Danese is pleased to announce its inaugural exhibition of paintings by Anne Appleby. With uncommon powers of observation and a meticulous hand, Appleby records the shifts and seasonal changes associated with the natural world. Combining oil and cold wax, the artist’s surfaces consist of thirty or more layers of subtly nuanced color, density, incident, gesture. The central reference in her work emanates from her profound relationship to Montana, her adopted state and its transcendent landscape – specifically the seasonal transition of its trees, plants, wild flowers and grasses – and its enduring power to elevate the human spirit.
Appleby demonstrates a singular and independent awareness of the power of art to illuminate ordinary phenomena. She successfully provides for the opposing claims of art and botany, mysticism and rational thought, the austere and the lush. Her paintings evoke a range of associations and metaphors that inform our personal fields of experience, references at once private and universal in the perennial cycle of life, death and renewal. "The titles of multi-panel pictures…evoke the power of memory to sum up manifold experiences in single sensations…they demonstrate an aspect of the real: that quality of it that seems to rise to meet our scrutiny, that confirms perceptually our participation in the world we see." [1]
Appleby’s paintings were the subject of a recent exhibition in 2011 at The Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University, Kansas. She has had solo exhibitions at the Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch, Germany, 2010, and the Boise Art Museum, 2000. In 2007 the artist was featured at the Villa e Collezione Panza, Varese, Italy, which commissioned a permanent major painting installation.
The artist was born in Harrisburg, PA in 1954; she received her BFA from the University of Montana, Missoula in 1977, and her MFA in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1989. In addition, she apprenticed for fifteen years with respected Native American tribal artist and holy man Ed Barbeau. Appleby’s paintings are included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; the Seattle Art Museum; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; the Berkeley Art Museum; Boise Art Museum; and the San Jose Museum of Art. She has received numerous awards including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Award, the SFMoMA SECA Art Award and the Pollock-Krasner Award. Appleby lives and works in Jefferson City, Montana.
A full color catalogue accompanies the exhibition, and is available online either through the gallery website or at www.blurb.com.
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[1] Baker, Kenneth. “Memory Fields,” in Anne Appleby. Gallery Paule-Anglim, San Francisco, 2000.
