Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of new paintings by Mary Didoardo titled Short Story. This is her third solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception for the artist will be held on May 21st from 6-8pm.
Mary Didoardo builds her oil paintings on panel in accumulated layers, then excavates them. After several painted passages, she covers the surface with packaging tape and carries a gestural, looping, and often continuous line across it. The line is not a single passage but is often wiped away and redrawn until the gesture “feels right.” Only then is it cut, slowly and deliberately, as she follows that path with an X-Acto knife, lifting the tape and removing the line from the surface. The resulting channel is painted, the surface covered again, and the process repeated. When all of the tape is finally removed, flakes of paint lift with it, revealing earlier colors sealed beneath and exposing the full history of the painting. As the artist notes, “ This process integrates and embeds the line and keeps it from being simply a design element. It draws the space. The many stages are visible and are there for the viewer to read. Consistent in most of these paintings is the underlying evidence of previous stages of "failed paintings" rising to the surface through layers built up, scraped down, enriching the final version.”In the resulting compositions, fields of bold color are activated by generous, looping lines that hover between control and release. The lines read as instinctive, but are in fact adjusted, erased, and painstakingly cut into place. The work meanders at the edge of chaos, then settles into balance. That tension between intuition and labor, gesture and incision, is held in the physical presence of the surface.
Mary Didoardo lives and works in Long Island City. She received her BFA in Art Education from Pratt Institute where she studied Sculpture and Painting. Her work has been exhibited extensively in New York, including at the Strohl Art Gallery at Chautauqua Institution, White Columns, the C.G Jung Foundation, and the Painting Center. She is a recipient of the Enrico Donati Foundation Grant and a resident at the Millay Colony.
