The Abrons Arts Center is proud to present the exhibition, Visible Storage, in the Charles E. Culpeper Gallery. Beth Livensperger has made a painting series of reflections on glass or other surfaces. The reflections are a zone of overlap between mark-making and depiction, and a way to consider a ... Read more
The Abrons Arts Center is proud to present the exhibition, Visible Storage, in the Charles E. Culpeper Gallery. Beth Livensperger has made a painting series of reflections on glass or other surfaces. The reflections are a zone of overlap between mark-making and depiction, and a way to consider a flat space and a deep space simultaneously.
The paintings of Visible Storage become simply about the experience of looking. They confound the viewer’s sense of placement, inserting slivers of space behind one’s presumed vantage point. This fragmented, cropped aspect suggests imperfect recall, and thus fluctuates between memory and immediacy.
The glass pane acts as a barrier: it reiterates the artist’s relationship to what she paints. The Great Wall of China is painted as a poster in a Brooklyn restaurant, and American period furniture is painted from a display in the Metropolitan Museum. She takes on the impractical romance of these subjects without treading into fantasy and stories. The work engages material fact, but also courts the irreconcilable, the mnemonic and the emotional.
Beth Livensperger, Ohio native, attended The Cooper Union from 1997-2001. She was a fellow of Philadelphia’s Center for Emerging Visual Artists from 2003-2005. Livensperger received her M.F.A. in 2008, and currently lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens. She teaches art at several universities in New York. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the last five years, including Platonia at The Gathering of the Tribes (New York, NY), Crossroads at Ruth Bachofner Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and Young Talent 2009 at the Washington Art Association (Washington Depot, CT).
