Untitled, acrylic on canvas, by Meryl Wilen-Greenfield
(MONTEREY, Mass.) – SPACE-out-LINED, an exhibition of paintings and photographs by Meryl Wilen-Greenfield, will open at Knox Gallery at the Monterey Library on Friday, March 27, 2015. There will be an opening reception on Saturday, March 28, from 6 to 7:30 pm, at which the artist will talk briefly about her influences, work, and process, at 6:45 pm.
Wilen-Greenfield reports that she “landed in Monterey in 1986 when my focus was on parenting, public policy and politics. Since the turn of the century, two more ‘P’s’ have expanded my repertoire: painting and photography.”
Wilen-Greenfield received a BA from Smith College in 1956 and a Masters in City and Regional Planning twenty years later from Rutgers University, but a painting class at IS183 in 2001 opened a new world to her. She returned to New York City and enrolled in an abstract expressionism class at the Art Students League. Why modern art? “I thought it would be easy because I wouldn’t need to draw,” she explains. “I could just play with form and texture and splashes of color…. just as I’d loved to do when I decorated and redecorated my houses. So abstract art it was.”
Meryl Wilen-Greenfield
But easy it wasn’t. After years of work the artist admits that she has barely begun to understand the language of abstraction. More recently she began photographing images as an adjunct to her studies of abstraction and through these mediums she strives to create both a sense of movement and stillness in the open space created in her images. Working with a limited palette, disregarding the idea of perspective, she strives for an illusion of movement and balance. Her geometric forms in undefined space evoke reality with the unreal, form against formlessness, known versus the imagined. “While a viewer may consider my work contemplative, destabilizing or surreal, for me it is a reflection of the real world,” Wilen-Greenfield states.
The exhibit continues through May 2 and can be viewed during library hours.
Knox Gallery, Monterey Library, 452 Main Road, Monterey, MA, 413-528-3795. Facebook.com/Knox Gallery. @Knox_Gallery on Twitter.