Claire Seidl

Exhibition Dates: May 19, 2008 - June 13, 2008

reception: Thursday, May 22, 6 - 8 PM

The Painting Center is pleased to present new paintings by Claire Seidl, in the Project Room. Claire Seidl has been an abstract painter for thirty years. She has had over twenty solo shows in New York City, where she is based, and in Maine, where she lives and works part of the year. Her work has been extensively reviewed in the art press - Art in America, the New York Observer, The New York Times, Art News, the Brooklyn Rail, the Portland Press Herald and other publications. She has shown her work in galleries, universities and museums including the Portland Museum of Art, the Aldrich Museum, the McNay Art Museum, the Noyes Museum , the Center for Maine Contemporary Art and upcoming this summer at the Novrosibirsk State Art Museum in Russia. For more information, please visit www.claireseidl.com.

The paintings in this show are representative of Seidl’s most recent work. Seidl’s sensibility is one of ordering and shaping that is both modest and certain, dark and joyful, emotional and restrained. Her art has achieved a level that is mature, confident and personal in its focus and vocabulary. She maintains a driven engagement in the search for the meaning of what is seen.

“Seidl investigates the most fundamental aspect of making and responding to art; the act of seeing itself. The diversity of her recent work reflects both the largeness of her theme and the fact that that multiplicity is not only permitted but demanded by her self-imposed task of inventing (and/or discovering) visual equivalents for a host of ways of seeing…it is the product of the same highly individual sensibility, the same vision, the same obsession with the permutations of the act of looking, and by extension with perception itself.” Karen Wilkin, Catalogue Essay, Rosenberg+Kaufman Fine Art, 2004 “Seidl’s paintings, with their blunted contours, blending chroma and reticulate brushwork, are all about flux, immanence, and the mutating visual field.” Stephen Maine, Art in America December 2004