For exhibition 16 in the room for paper we are presenting Bay Area painter Judith Foosaner, who has been exhibiting here and around the country since the 1960s. Her emphasis has been on drawing and its place in the changing fortunes of painting. Recently, she began reaching back into her inventor... Read more
For exhibition 16 in the room for paper we are presenting Bay Area painter Judith Foosaner, who has been exhibiting here and around the country since the 1960s. Her emphasis has been on drawing and its place in the changing fortunes of painting. Recently, she began reaching back into her inventory of drawing for raw material, cutting and composing old work into new collage hybrids. The drawings take on the aura of found materials, yet retain the vestige of her personal history. The result is a play of formal motifs that reads like autobiography. Foosaner uses traditional techniques and materials as she pulls her past into the present, and her usage places these works in the lineage of collage in painting most popularly familiar from cubism. To history she brings her own history. Her images point inward to a seasoned artist’s psychic toolbox, and a set of fluid archetypes, part flora and part fauna, continually fluctuating between deeply personal content and universally shared impressions. These works, though nocturnal, exhibit a balance that speaks more of navigating the world’s labyrinth than getting lost in it. Foosaner’s drawings collaged from her own past manage an affirmation, one all the more convincing for its vantage‚ Äînot the foresight of an optimist but the hindsight of a survivor.
