MATtam 9
Manto Arte Temporanea | Temporary Art Manto
short exhibitions in found spaces
Palazzo Costa Vivaldini Carra | Via Grioli 46 | Mantova
Liz Ainslie
Small oil paintings
Sunday January 22 2012
only between 4:00 and 6:00 PM
I began each of these oil paintings knowing the scale of the shapes I wanted to include, and the color for the under-painting that I mixed in preparation. Once I applied the under-painting, I began mixing new colors. When shapes emerged from these colors, I blended more colors and resolved the remaining negative space. I did not let the shapes extend much beyond the edges of the canvas. In trying to find every time a different way to paint shapes, I arrived at them from the inside out, without any previous drawing or outline. Everything emerged by the action of my hand, which moves within a certain range of motion. Working within a set of parameters provides a specificity that allows me to be intuitive within my chosen visual language. The paintings come to be indirect extractions of landscapes or objects, ambiguous enough so that the references to items and landscape are not illustrations, but proxies that can move in and out of contexts.
Liz Ainslie was born (1978) in Schenectady, NY and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from Tyler School of Art in 2004, where she was awarded a Project Completion Grant and the Rome Art and Culture Award. She received her BFA with honors from Alfred University in 2001. Recently, Ainslie was a resident at The Millay Colony for the Arts, Austerlitz, NY.
Ainslie's work has been included in shows at A.M. Richard Fine Art, Rabbitholestudio and A.I.R. gallery in Brooklyn, NY, Ice Box Project Space in Philadelphia, PA, and Artjail and Spazio 522 in Manhattan. In 2009 she had a solo show at Creon Gallery in Manhattan. Her work has been reviewed in the ArtCal Zine, Los Angeles, CA, Il Giornale Dell' Arte, Torino, Italy, and the blogs of Hrag Vartanian and Otino Corsano. She was featured on the Standard Interview Blog and the Pencil in the Studio Blog. Her work can be found in the Pierogi Flat files, The Irving Sandler Artist File at Artists Space and the Nurture Art Registry.
