Danese/Corey is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Emily Eveleth. In
these works, Eveleth continues to explore the ironic and expressive potential of her
signature image, the ordinary and ubiquitous doughnut. In the process, she invests her
subject with unexpected presence and identity, ranging from the literal to the abstract,
from the dramatic to the contemplative – expressing vulnerability, sensuality and humor.
This new body of work further confirms Eveleth’s technical achievements, her mastery of
the intricacies, nuances and demands of painting. It extends her narrative, the doughnut
as a thing of beauty, the very embodiment of pleasure, comfort and self-indulgence. The
doughnuts function simultaneously as still life, landscape, portrait and anthropomorphized
objects of “projected desire,’ eroticism, and in many instances, explicit sexuality.1
Eveleth’s monumental painting Big Pink recalls Matisse’s glorious Large Reclining Nude
(1935) along with the voluptuous physical presence of Ingres’s odalisques in The Turkish
Bath (1862). As much as these are doughnuts, they are not – “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”
(Magritte).
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 museum, corporate and private collections. Among
other awards, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for
Painting, a French Government Grant for the Artist-in-Residency Program in Rochefort-
en-Terre, and a visiting artist residency at the American Academy in Rome. She currently
lives and works in Massachusetts.