McKenzie Fine Art: Exhibition: Curvilinear Abstraction 2025

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


	Curvilinear Abstraction July 11 - August 15, 2025
	This exhibition features paintings, sculpture, drawings, and collage by twelve artists exploring curvilinear and concentric forms and structures in their work: Michelle Benoit, Nancy Blum, Lori Ellison (1958-2015), Pauline Galiana, Lisa Hoke, Jenny Kemp, Mery Lynn McCorkle, Maureen McQuillan, Sky Pape, Jessica Deane Rosner, Katia Santibañez, and Sarah Walker. Nancy Blum’s swirling, stylized cloud imagery, in colored pencil on black paper, is inspired by sacred Buddhist Thangka painting and her own spiritual practice. A path to meditation and contemplation arises as the eye travels among the spirals and apertures in these dynamic compositions. In intimately scaled gouache on panel paintings, Lori Ellison drew from textile patterns, architectural elements, and botanical imagery. Repeated arcing elements and a meandering maze of linked pod shapes pulse with devotional intensity in her all-over compositions. Maureen McQuillan creates vibrantly hued paintings with multiple layers of ink and acrylic polymer to convey a deep sense of space. Rippling, wave-like linear elements and undulating rounded forms suggest shapes in nature as well as the human body. Working in ink on Yupo paper, Jessica Deane Rosner’s detailed and intricate eight-part work was created using simple rules: each sheet was divided into quadrants and drawn with a combination of tools and freehand work. Despite the complexity, irregularity, and small scale of the individual elements, the work carries a sculptural heft, communicating density and weight. Katia Santibañez has frequently used spiraling compositional structures based on observations of both natural and man-made forms, from snail shells and spiderwebs to the arrangement of Parisian arrondissement. Suggesting movement backward and forward in time, for her the spiral is an image of the world where beauty, order, chaos, and the infinite coalesce. In Sky Pape’s detailed linear works on paper, circular layering and spiraling imagery suggest the vastness and immensity of the cosmos. For Pape, circles and spirals are archetypal symbols related to wholeness, transformation, and time. Jenny Kemp’s vibrant, jewel-toned paintings display undulating bands in concentric arrangements of gradated color. Biomorphic forms and anatomical shapes suggest states of organic growth, capturing moments of stillness amidst motion. Sarah Walker’s brightly colored paintings are meditations on the evolution of form. Starting from an organic progression of concentric rings of pooled paint, central forms emerge from enveloping shapes and skeletal infrastructures, calling to mind both living entities and inanimate objects. Mery Lynn McCorkle was inspired by the transformative and heart-aching beauty of Billie Holiday’s rendition of Abel Meeropol’s song, Strange Fruit, despite its horrific subject. The artist uses concentric petal shapes to evoke abundance, effulgence, and renewal emerging from density and darkness. Pauline Galiana creates collages from discarded personal documents, notes, even artwork. Paper is carefully cut, looped, and arrayed in rigorous compositions of arcing forms and expansive circular shapes. The artist sees them as records of resilience and the mind’s determination to rebuild form from eventual entropy. Lisa Hoke has long used found items in her lively and playful collages. Here, she fans vintage playing cards into dynamic arcs and spirals, creating energetic abstract compositions that are boldly colorful and rhythmically repeating. Michelle Benoit’s colored Lucite and wood sculptures have always been drawn from her experience of color as an evocation and excavation of memory, experience, and sense of place. The transience of time is embodied in the works’ inherent capacity to change in shifting light.