Marianne Vitale

New Work

May 8th, 2010 to June 26^th, 2010

Opening Reception: Saturday, May 8^th, 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

Deborah Colton is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by the quixotic New York artist Marianne Vitale at Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston. In a vibrant series of large paintings, dense and thick with pigment, Vitale hypertrophies the intricate intimacy of her pen and ink drawings into a churning no-fly zone over the contemporary. Accompanying these canvases, Vitale has constructed one of her hybrid sculptures out of found material and debris reclaimed from the neighborhoods surrounding the gallery.

Also on view are two series of drawings: five colorful and riddling pen and ink compositions (2008), and nine fast and forcible sequential graphite drawings on copper-coated paper (2009).

This is Vitale’s third exhibition with Deborah Colton: Chemical City (2007), a group show in which Vitale presented Crude Oil on Silk and Flipper Baritone, among other works, and later that year a solo production entitled Tryst at Urn Stye.

Marianne Vitale is a New York artist working in various mediums.  Her sculptural practice often evokes an idea of the natural world remade from what has been discarded and abandoned.  Recently brought together with metal and made permanent, Vitale freezes these forms into make-shift structures, fantastic creatures, hybrid animals and contorted beasts that can appear both fragile and menacing.   Sometimes sympathetic, often uneasy, Vitale’s sculptures pull the tension between figure and abstraction, mid-process of either melting or forming, with skin dripping from their frames. These extracts stretch, move, coil, hide, and invite to mark an encounter of sinister illusoriness. When using performance and video, Vitale draws on the instinctive yet carefully sculpted absurdity apparent in her drawings and sculptures, with an added personal physicality that creates a visceral, even combative relationship between artist and audience. Vitale’s work has been exhibited internationally, including the 2010 Whitney Biennial, SculptureCenter, White Columns, Kunstverein NY, all in New York; Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, Iceland; Deborah Colton Gallery, Houston, Texas; IBID Projects, London, UK; and the Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex, England.

Deborah Colton Gallery is founded on being an innovative showcase for ongoing presentation and promotion of strong historical and visionary contemporary artists world-wide, whose diverse practices include painting, works on paper, sculpture, video, photography, performance, conceptual future media and public space installations. The Gallery aspires to provide a forum through connecting Texas, national and international artist s to make positive change.