Romantic Comedy: Pam Glick

MARUANI MERCIER is delighted to present Romantic Comedy, the exhibition of new paintings by Pam Glick, opening on 22 April at our Brussels gallery. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and her first in Belgium. Constructed in vibrant blocks of carefully selected hues of pink, orange, green, and blue, the paintings in Romantic Comedy are resolutely celebratory, projecting a sense of joy and unimpeded rhythm. Departing from the monochrome ground that dominated Glick’s earlier works, the compositions are compelling studies in intermittent depth and light conjured by distinct colour fields. Quilt-like, the paintings evoke accumulations of flashes of human experience and echo the orthogonal patterns of the New York streets.

 

Melding improvisation with intent awareness of colour and grid-like form, the works in the exhibition build upon the artist’s decades-long exploration of painterly abstraction. In each work, dynamic cursive lines pulse and zig-zag, softening the linear architecture of the composition. Addressing the legacy of Modernism and the history of abstract painting, Glick embraces the free momentum of the hand and body in the undulating lines, locating the authentic and immediate expression of being in the world.

 

Glick’s process reflects a dialogic tension between the procedural and automatic, conscious and instinctive palpable in her practice. The artist begins by mapping a grid of guiding lines in pencil that later serves as an armature for the composition. Moving the canvas from the wall to the floor, Glick then constructs a layer of painted blocks of colour succeeded by rhythmic all-over gestural marks. The short cadence of the looping lines points at the proximity of the artist’s body to the canvas, the continued rhythm of the lines projecting a sense of physical as well as mental endurance. As she notes, “When the work is up on the wall, it's as if I'm looking over my own shoulder and I’m judging it. And when it's on the ground, I'm not hyper-overseeing what I'm doing, and often spatial things will occur that I couldn't have planned out.” Immersing herself in the pictorial field, Glick thus relentlessly reinvents her compositions, fusing improvisation and play with a sense of mystery.