JANUARY 21 – MARCH 5, 2022

AUSTIN BALLARD & ERIN MURRAY
BREATHER

MEET THE ARTISTS: Friday, January 21 | 5 – 7:30 PM
Masks are required. Please note that in light of the recent surge, we will not be serving refreshments.

Pentimenti Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition, featuring the work of Austin Ballard and Erin Murray. This is the gallery’s first exhibition of the new year.

The pairing of Ballard and Murray focuses on and highlights the seven basic elements of art: shape, color, space, form, line, value, and texture. The success of a composition, and thereby the strength of an artwork is often judged along the metric of how well an artist utilizes these seven elements. The viewer’s perception of the serendipity of an artwork aligns with the rules of these elements whether the viewer is conscious of them or not.

Ballard and Murray make work that innovates shape, celebrates form, dances through space, makes decadent use of value and texture, and is subtly accented with color. Both artists masterfully create playgrounds of abstract imagery from dreamlike, shifting forms and decisive lines.

Austin Ballard works in cane webbing and epoxy clay to build abstract sculptures that center movement and form. His multifaceted pieces weave through space and through themselves, both in concept and materiality. Using processes derived from textile pattern manipulation and ceramic slab building, Ballard synthesizes both traditional and innovative sculptural techniques to achieve dazzling effects.

Austin Ballard (b. 1987, Charlotte, NC) received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and his BFA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has exhibited work at Provincetown Art Museum, Provincetown, MA; Smack Mellon, New York, NY; Wave Hill, New York, NY; Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY; among many other venues. He has been awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Sculpture Scholarship, Windgate Foundation Fellowship, Kenneth Stubbs Endowed Fellowship and the Rhode Island School of Design Graduate Studies Grant, and fellowships to the Museum of Arts and Design, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Vermont Studio Center, Wassaic Project, McColl Center for Art + Innovation, the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, among other awards and fellowships.

Erin Murray’s drawings in ink and graphite depict dreamlike imagery that references urban landscape, architecture, and an obscure symbolic hierarchy. The perception of the viewer is invoked, as the familiar forms of windowpanes and curtains become abstract projections of the mind’s eye. Soft, curving forms, bold latticework, and veiling shapes all interact in transit across the surface like inversions of light beneath eyelids.

Erin Murray (b. 1979, Philadelphia, PA) received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. She has shown at such institutions as Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE; Rowan University Art Gallery, Glassboro, NJ; William Penn Foundation, Philadelphia, PA; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Fleisher Art Memorial, Philadelphia, PA; among many other venues. She is the recipient of a 2018 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the West Collects acquisition prize and other awards. She has participated in multiple residencies and programs, including The Drawing Center 20/21 Viewing Program.

For all inquiries, please contact us at mail@pentimenti.com or +1 215.625.9990.