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Joanne Mattera
Silk Road 375, 2017, encaustic on panel, 12 x 12 x 2 inches

2017

About the Item

Lush Minimalism Silk Road is chromatically juicy and compositionally reductive. Each painting in this ongoing series is a small, luminous color field composed with layers of translucent wax paint. This on-going series, which the artist began in 2005 , was inspired by the shimmery quality of iridescent silk, hence the title, but has evolved into a more expansive exploration of hue and surface. In plying a richness of paint against a limited palette in each painting, Joanne Mattera sets in motion a small-scale dynamic in which more and less jostle for primacy. Working serially allows Mattera to develop a number of chromatic ideas, each discrete, which converse well in groupings and grids. The perimeter of each painting presents a complementary, or complimentary, hue, thus enlivening the color field and moving the eye from painting to painting. Joanne Mattera paints in a style that is luminous and reductive, exhibiting a textile sensibility she inherited from a family of weavers and tailors. “Early on I denied that association. I took my painting in a different, grid-based direction until I realized that the interstices of warp and weft and the rectilinearity of the modernist grid are not, in fact, so different.” With that insight, her work became more actively referential to textiles while remaining assertively painterly. Her ongoing series, Silk Road, reflects those concerns. With their formal exploration of hue and surface, her juicy little paintings are nevertheless suggestive of iridescent textiles, which gave the series its name. Mattera has exhibited galleries and museums throughout the United States and abroad. In New York City, which she considers home base, she has had solos at the Stephen Haller Gallery (1995) and OK Harris Works of Art (1996 and 2007) and in recent years has participated in group exhibitions at DM Contemporary, where she was for some time a represented artist, as well as at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery and Margaret Thatcher Projects. She has enjoyed longstanding representation with Arden Gallery in Boston; Kenise Barnes Fine Art in Larchmont, New York, and the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta. Her 35th career solo, Dawn to Dusk, will take place at ODETTA at 1st Dibs Gallery in Fall 2019. Mattera’s paintings and works on paper are in the collections of the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; University Collections, State University at Albany; Connecticut College Print Collection; the U.S. State Department; and institutional and private collections. Mattera is a member of American Abstract Artists and exhibits regularly with them, most recently Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists, 1936-Present, which is traveling through 2021. Her memoir, Vita: Growing Up Italian, Coming Out, and Making a Life in Art, was published this year by Well-Fed Artist Press, New York City. She divides her time between Manhattan and Massachusetts, shuttling so regularly that, she says, “Sometimes I feel like my third home is the Merritt Parkway.”
  • Creator:
    Joanne Mattera (1948, American)
  • Creation Year:
    2017
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 12 in (30.48 cm)Width: 12 in (30.48 cm)Depth: 2 in (5.08 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Darien, CT
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU17224509081

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