Foley Gallery is pleased to present “in the precipice”, a solo exhibition featuring new work by New York City based artist Karen Margolis. This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
“in the precipice” references an approaching transition, nearing a threshold between mindfulness and the yearning to escape into an abyss of fantasy or delusion. Margolis encodes her thoughts and feelings into colored dots as a means of plotting out the changing landscape of her emotions. Translating meaning into pattern, she offers a glimpse into the ephemeral nature of the mind's operations.
After scribbling themes from her writings onto the forms, Margolis refers to a Flow Chart she devised, which assigns every emotion a Pantone reproducible color, and translates her feelings into colored dots directly onto the composition. At this point, her process transitions into choreographing color mergers. The new works in “in the precipice” continue to use Karen’s flow chart of emotions, but have evolved into more interpretive narratives, relying as much on texture and form as on color to convey meaning, albeit, encoded. This work was developed more instinctually and extemporaneously, mostly unmediated by cogitation.
Karen Margolis graduated with a BS in Psychology from Colorado State University and studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1999) and a recent commission by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to create a site-specific mosaic for a New York City subway station. Margolis participated in the 2016 Paper Biennial at the Rijswijk Museum, The Hague, Netherlands, and has exhibited at galleries and institutions including Garis & Hahn, New York; Muriel Guepin, New York; and Bridgewater University, Bridgewater, MA. Karen’s work is currently in a traveling show “cut up/cut out,” which will be featured in regional museums around the country. Her work is included in public and private collections in the US and abroad.
“in the precipice” is on view through November 17th, 2019. Foley Gallery is open Wednesday through Saturday, 11 – 5:30pm and Sunday from 12-5pm. To request images; please contact the gallery at info@foleygallery.com.