Eve Aschheim, Thing, 1999, gesso, black gesso, ink, graphite on Duralene, 12 x 9 inches, photography: Farzad Owrang, New York

Eve Aschheim: Recent Works
Saturday, February 1 - Friday, March 14, 2003  
Really, universally, relationships stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.
Henry James


Eve Aschheim: Recent Works presents paintings, drawings, and photograms by an artist who plays in the most delicate fashion with spatial dimensions and relationships. Her paintings feature gestural marks in shades of blue and gray which possess a subtle visual weight as they move or linger within the white ground that comes to surround them. The ellipses and series of dashes collectively form fields of energy, some quite calming and others with rain-like motion or flickering patterns. There is a highly sophisticated allusion to compositional structure evoked by discrete spatial links between the air-borne marks and shapes.

In contrast to the pure abstraction of the paintings, Aschheim’s drawings on Mylar are more referential in that they suggest unbuildable architectural systems. Again, there is much variation within the artist’s inclination towards reduced elements and so several of the works consist of such a density of lines and intersecting planes that the space simultaneously expands and compresses. Another suite of drawings combines scattered bits of clearly defined shapes with areas of smudges and erasures that create a non-compositional diffusion.

Also on view is a series of photograms with which the artist has been recently experimenting. The photograms were made by placing a select few of the Mylar drawings directly onto sheets of photographic paper which were then exposed to light. Being a semi-transparent material, the Mylar allowed enough light through to the photosensitive paper which, when fixed, resulted in a reversal of the black, gray, and white marks of the original drawing. The spaces that had been contained—in some instances, practically incarcerated—by hard-edged layers of lines are here given their form while the smudged "foggy" areas turn into black holes with hints of depth around them.

Eve Aschheim is on view at the University Gallery from February 1 through March 25, 2003. The University Gallery, located on the lower level of the Fine Arts Center, is open Tuesday through Friday from 11a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from to 2 to 5 p.m. The Gallery is also open during evening performances held in the Concert Hall of the Fine Arts Center. For further information, please call (413) 545-3670.