LINDA GEARY – RECENT WORK
Dates: February 3 – March 15
Opening Reception: Thursday February 3, 6–8 pm

Marcel Sitcoske Gallery is proud to present new work by Bay Area abstract painter Linda Geary. The sensuously built-up canvases of Linda Geary enliven and reinvigorate the traditions of abstraction, while taking it in a new direction.

Using oil paint, wax and enamel paint, Geary explores the complexities and contrasts of her medium. Each painting is the result of a long and rigorous process of addition and erasure. She repeatedly builds up her surfaces and scrapes them away, revealing the canvas underneath. Each consecutive layer of wax and oil paint lends substance and mass to her works while at the same time obscuring previous layers. In some of the works, Geary has dropped linseed oil or varnish onto her canvases, adding a contrast to the wax. Similarly her sparse use of enamel paint offers a contrast to the oil paint. Chromatically, she has varied her somewhat muted palette of deep grays and browns with brilliant reds, greens, yellows, and blues.

This combination of different textures draws our focus to the tactility and materiality of her paintings. The deep cracks and wrinkled skin of her thick surfaces bear some similarity to topographical maps or cave paintings. These works, however, are more about the process of becoming than about representing the physical world. Their organic quality gives the sense that they have perhaps created themselves, as they are examples of the struggle to create form out of chaos.