Nora Griffin

Louis B. James is pleased to present Modern Love, Nora Griffin’s solo debut exhibition of paintings in New York City. Griffin’s oil paintings are contained within wood frames, in many cases all-over painted by the artist. The frames are integral to the picture plane of the canvas, yet at the same time define the work as a singular object. The show’s title connotes the artist’s love of the Modern, in all its guises, as well as referencing the 1983 David Bowie song, and the role that soulful pop and rock music plays in her artistic practice.

The artist’s employment of color affirms the visual over the theoretical and the vibrant plasticity of the medium. The paintings are rendered in bold variations of turquoise, cadmium yellow and red, cobalt blue, pink, indigo and the occasional silver. Recurring motifs of zig-zags, bisected color fields, and lyrical mark-making are evocative of the jazzy rhythm of early Elizabeth Murray and the serious-funny empathy of Paul Thek’s 1980s paintings.

Several of the abstract compositions are punctuated with black and white painted images of a young Bob Dylan, cropped close-ups from Manet paintings, and pages from a textbook on Ancient Egypt. Realized with a felt sensitivity these figures inhabit the paintings in the same manner as a sweeping brush mark or a note pure color.

Griffin’s paintings give voice to the dialectic of mystical and physical; titles such as Material World, Diamond Heart, and Sci-Fi Scorpio refer to astrology, worldliness, and the loaded symbolism of forms. A novel aspect of these most recent paintings is the motif of interlocking patterns realized in a Pop palate that are reminiscent of camouflage or map outlines. These shapes are a key component of the artist’s personal lexicon, and like the frames they serve to unify the paintings into a coherent series.

A catalogue with a conversation between Griffin and Peter Gallo will be available at the gallery.

Nora Griffin (b. 1982, New York, NY) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Oberlin College. Recent group shows include: Intimacy in Discourse: Unreasonable Sized Paintings, curated by Phong Bui, at SVA Chelsea Gallery, EXPO Chicago with Louis B. James; Oysters with Lemon at Ventana244, Brooklyn, NY; NADA NY with Louis B. James; Sargent’s Daughters at Sargent’s Daughters, New York, NY; Off-White Desert at Louis B. James, and Come Together: Surviving Sandy, curated by Phong Bui, at Industry City, Brooklyn, NY. Griffin writes criticism for Art in America and The Brooklyn Rail, and has written catalogue essays for Eleanor Ray and Ruth Root. Her fellowships include the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY; and the BAU/Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. She has taught at Columbia University and School of Visual Arts in New York, and has been a visiting artist/critic at the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and The Cooper Union in New York.