Danese is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Emily Eveleth. For nearly two decades, the artist has insistently pursued the ironic and expressive potential of her signature image, the ordinary and ubiquitous doughnut. The new paintings amplify and extend Eveleth’s technical achievements and formal concerns, while adding dramatically to her pictorial range. Yellow custard slowly emerges from the broken center of a thick, flaky doughnut in the painting Regency. Held offers the viewer a magnificent, lustrous confection, pink frosting cascading into the foreground.
Eveleth locates the sublime in the velvety textures and resplendent brushstrokes of metaphor-rich imagery. She eliminates the boundaries between still life, landscape and portraiture and invests her subject with unexpected presence and identity – monumentality and pathos, innocence and the profane, eroticism and humor. "Viewed at close range, the imagery dissolves into buttery abstraction, like the thighs on a Rubens nude…."[1] " It’s the creamy tones and tangible fat brushstrokes in the paintings that make their surfaces so seductive. However, the lasting impression from Eveleth’s work is not the sugar rush but the references to other paintings. Fluffy doughnuts sometimes recall Baroque clouds, triangular compositions evoke the aspiring postures of Géricault, and her evocative light can call Friedrich to mind. With so inconsequential a subject; the painter’s skill takes all the credit."[2]
Emily Eveleth was born in Connecticut in 1960. She received an undergraduate degree from Smith College and pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts College of Art. Her work is included in prominent museums, corporate and private collections. In 2010 the artist had a solo exhibition at Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, MA. Among other awards, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Painting, and a French Government Grant for the Artist-in-Residency Program in Rochefort-en-Terre. She was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. She currently lives and works in Massachusetts.
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[1] “Goings on About Town,” The New Yorker, October 2, 2008.
[2] Janet Koplos. “Emily Eveleth at Danese,” Art in America, July 2003, p. 88.