McKenzie Fine Art: Aric Obrosey 2025 Exhibition

55 Orchard Street, New York, New York 10002 212 989 5467


	Aric Obrosey: Ten Drawings for Claudia February 21 - March 30, 2025
	For over thirty years Aric Obrosey has used lace imagery in his work, attracted to its intricate patterning, structural complexity, precise detail, and overall beauty. In this exhibition, small-scale drawings executed largely in ink and gouache pay homage to Frank Stella’s Black Paintings from the late 1950s, in particular, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II, 1959, in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In the same way that Stella created narrow gaps of untouched canvas in his black-banded paintings (the so-called “pin stripes”), Obrosey forms varied reticella lace motifs by edging ink towards untouched white paper in his drawings. The bands in the post and lintel structure are inked in black in some works, in others they are articulated with loosely brushed grays or other colors, or filled with narrow linear elements. While he has retained Stella’s repeated structural arrangements, Obrosey enhances the architectonic quality of the compositions by adding central portals, lending an air of mystery and uncertainty to the spaces. As the series progressed and became more autonomous, Obrosey began to fill the bands with clusters of precise marks and discrete, varied patterns, as in work he had made decades earlier. Obrosey began to think of this mark-making as akin to abstracted memories. Eventually the lace patterns disappeared altogether, replaced by structures filled with “memory marks,” dense in places, and more openly spaced in others. While these marks retain the complexity and precision of his lace renditions, they also impart a sense of movement and heightened energy to the reductive compositional structures. These recent drawings retain all of the hallmarks of Obrosey’s work over the decades: an embrace of the endless possibilities of pattern rendered with a generous and focused intensity. Aric Obrosey was born in Pontiac, MI, received his BFA from the University of Michigan in 1979, and has lived and worked in New York since 1980. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in galleries and museums throughout the United States for the past forty-five years; it is held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS. He has been the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Artists Fellowship, and residencies at Yaddo. Obrosey’s work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artforum, TimeOut, Artnet, and The New York Times, among others.