Martha
Armstrong, Painter
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"Summer Green II" 34" x 50" Oil on canvas - ©2012 Martha Armstrong
Martha Armstrong - Recent Paintings
Bowery Gallery
530 West 25th Street, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10001
(646)230-6655
September 4-29, 2012
www.bowerygallery.org
Martha Armstrong Press Release, 2012
At Bowery Gallery in Chelsea Martha Armstrong is showing landscapes painted in Vermont over the last year, a dialogue with panting as much as with place over the seasons.
Martha Armstrong has had many one -person and group shows in the United States and Italy. She has received grants from Smith College, a residency at Hollins University, and at the Camargo Foundation in France, and was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.
She has taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, Indiana University, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Dartmouth, and Havorford Colleges, and now is a graduate critic at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
In 2003 Alexi Worth wrote in The New Yorker, "Armstrong's high, sharp energy is Yankee Fauvism at it's best." Lance Esplund, in Art in America, wrote in 2004, "I enjoy the all-out belting of the melody which is full of honesty and heart." In 2009 Victoria Donohue wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer, "In these works it's still possible to believe that aesthetic presence might have some impact on the hard reality of everyday existence", and in 2011 she wrote: "Her landscapes have a simplify and power; Their intensity of focus on feeling and seasonal changes (are) ambitious exercises in reconciling geometry and gesture…"
Armstrong studied at the Cincinnati Art Academy, Smith College, and Rhode Island School of Design. In addition to Bowery Gallery she shows at Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, Elder Gallery in Charlotte NC, and Oxbow Gallery in Northampton, MA.
Victoria Donahoe reviews Gross McCleaf show, Philadelphia Inquirer, November 2011
"...These have a simplicity and power, their intensity of focus on feeling and seasonal changes being major elements in the tale she tells of her Vermont studio's natural surroundings that include ambitious exercises in reconciling geometry and gesture..."
Carand Burnet reviews Oxbow show, ART NEW ENGLAND July 2011
"For the past fifteen years, painter Martha Armstrong has interpreted the view from her Vermont cottage, portraying the area with a mixture of recollection and spontaneity. In 'Vermont Landscapes', the viewer follows the seasons of this mountainside, watching the summer trees and autumn red forms dart across the canvas. Along the way, Armstrong introduces sawing fence poles as anchor points to distinguish the vicinity, and as she aids the viewer in discerning the scale of the forest. Tactile brushstrokes, inlaid side by side, define shapes that meander between abstraction and representation. read more
Broad Street Review
'Martha Armstrong at Gross McCleaf'
by Andrew Mangravite
March 7, 2009. Martha Armstrong's new exhibition at Gross McCleaf shows where she has been and where she is going- namely, from Expressionism to abstraction and back again. Her journey offers a nice emotional contrast to the drier, more intellectual vision of Cézanne. read more
Martha Armstrong retrospective at Gross McCleaf
'Canvases project personality'
by Victoria Donohue for the Inquirer
March 6, 2009. Anything but pompous, Martha Armstrong's art offers direct meaning without sacrificing visual sophistication. Armstrong is an image-maker best known for her landscape and cityscape paintings and an occasional still life. Such work is the major theme dominating the 46 year retrospective of her paintings and drawings, "Up to Now", at Gross McCleaf. read more |
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