Bard College Alumni/ae Association Presents
New York, NY - Mari Lyons '57 in Exhibition
Runs through Saturday, October 31, 2015
New York, NY
In her new show, FLOATING PALETTES and other recent work, Mari Lyons borrows an image, a sign, from the late, magical studio paintings of Georges Braque – with a nod, too, to the floating world of the Japanese Ukiyo—e print. In Braque’s metaphysical studio interiors, objects are transformed into towering events over which palette and bird float. He reinvents perceptual space. Lyons, in her interiors, uses objects, some real some imagined, to explore (for her) new spaces. Some of these objects, subjects, are an Ibibio sculpture (which she has nicknamed “Geraldine”), a carousel horse (the subject of many of her earlier paintings), an African rooster, a wooden copy of an eighteenth-century angel, casts from the ancient Greek, and all the paraphernalia — paints, brushes, paintings, vases, bottles, easels—things that inhabit a painter’s studio. In these, she mediates on the ever floating and forming language of painting in the dramatic world of the studio. “In these works,” says Lyons “ — some more objective, some more subjective. I have sometimes used the language of abstraction. All works in this show are an attempt to anchor ‘floating space’ into a bold celebration of the act of painting.”Mari Lyons studied with Max Beckmann and Fletcher Martin at Mills College; with Louis Schanker, Ludwig Sander, and Stefan Hirsch at Bard College (BA); with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier l7; at the Grand Chaumiere; with Bernard Chaet and Gabor Peterdi at the Yale-Norfolk Art School; and with Zoltan Zepeshy and Madison Fred Mitchell at Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA).
The artist has exhibited widely throughout the country and has lectured and had shows at The Munson-Williams- Proctor Institute, Rider University and elsewhere, and has cityscapes in the collections of The Museum of the City of New York and Rider University. She has had fourteen one-person shows at First Street Gallery in New York City, along with one-person and two-person shows at Rider University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Kirkland Art Center in Clinton (NY), Polari Gallery in Woodstock (NY), Windham Fine Arts in Windham (NY), and the Forsythe Gallery in Ann Arbor (MI), and many group shows. One Montana landscape traveled to Tunis as part of the Art in Embassies Program of the U.S. Department of State. She has paintings in more than one hundred private and corporate collections in the United States and abroad.
The artist is married to the writer-publisher Nick Lyons and has four grown children. She maintains studios in New York City and Woodstock, New York.
For more information, call 646-336-8053,
or visit http://www.firststreetgallery.net.
Location: New York, NY