Claire Oswalt

Broadway is pleased to present Primo Piano, the gallery’s third solo exhibition by Claire Oswalt.

While created in the artist’s familiar style of sewn canvas layered in her controlled palette of diffuse acrylic, this group of works represents a tighter compositional focus and refinement of previous presentations. Emphasizing a pronounced figure/ground relationship, Oswalt’s central motifs occupy celestial atmospheres, hazy with atomized pigment applied with an automotive airbrush.

A recent trip to Italy has provoked a newfound symmetry in Oswalt’s compositions which are inspired by tiled Roman flooring and its humble logic of simple forms in repetition.

Further, the jigsawed seams mimic the fragmentation of tiling while paradoxically eschewing its logic—revealing systems in a pas de deux of harmomy and friction. In another nod to the artisanal, the artist has devised a unique framing system of canvas-wrapped wood. Oswalt has effectively extended the canvas support to upholster the frame creating a tactile boundary that feels sculptural while subtly referencing her roots in quilting.

The exhibition’s title—Italian for “first floor”—underscores the importance of this unexpected inspiration with an alliterative flourish characteristic of Oswalt’s poetic tendencies and her continued commitment to exalting quotidian details.