Blue Mountain Gallery Presents: SHARYN FINNEGAN Evolution: Self-Portrait Retrospective, 9/6-10/1

A summation of a life can be seen in a retrospective of Sharyn Finnegan's self-portraits, the centerpiece of her Blue Mountain Gallery exhibit, Evolution, which also includes recent drawings and paintings. The portraits, from her 20s to her 60s, are large, small, split, clothed, nude and intense. Arrogant youth and a bright palette give way to bemusement and delicate form. Finnegan views her self-portraits as her ongoing autobiography, and they are her single most repeated subject over the course of a career that addressed many subjects. Highly personal and emotional, she scrutinizes the external reality of herself, infusing the isolated figure with a stark tension. Most have a strong central axis and clearly defined compositional lines riveting the viewer in the exact spot from which the artist studied her subject in the mirror. Perhaps the viewer is the one being examined.

The exhibit will be on display from Sept. 6 - Oct. 1, 2011 with a reception Thursday Sept. 8, 5-8pm.

Recent trips to the coasts of England, Iceland, and Maine, plus a few from her home in NYC, produced the landscape charcoal drawings and paintings that comprise the rest of the exhibit. Believing that variability and complexity are closer to our real lives, Finnegan seeks to reflect these qualities in her round, tall or very horizontal paintings of all sizes. She especially likes the challenge of encompassing subjects of large scale on small canvases.

The artist was born in 1946 in NYC. She has exhibited at the Queens Museum, the Grey Gallery at NYU, the Roswell Museum of Fine Arts, NM and the Dishman Museum in Texas, as well as other venues since the 1970s. She has done many artist-in-residency programs internationally, including the MacDowell Colony, N.H., and, most recently in 2011, the Brisons Veor Trust in Cornwall, UK. She is currently on the faculty of Parsons The New School of Design, NYC, and an article of hers entitled Juanita McNeely, Art and Life Entwined is coming out in the November Fall/Winter issue of The Woman's Art Journal.

 

Blue Mountain Gallery, 530 W. 25th Street, NYC
Free and open to public,

Nearest Subway: 23rd street stop of A and E trains, 8th Avenue line.