22 February – 5 April

Anoka Faruqee
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Anoka Faruqee’s exceptionally beautiful paintings are the
product of an insistent practice of conceptual exploration.

In one series of works, Faruqee has meticulously replicated
paintings that have been spontaneously poured or brushed
by analyzing complex color shifts and reproducing their
effects through highly controlled mark making. The gestural
“original” and labor-intensive “copy” hang together as
diptychs.

In her “Fade” paintings, patterns of hand-made pixels
appear to fade away or disappear into the painting’s ground
color. The effect is like viewing a pattern through a spill of
translucent color. Or looking through a shifting, colored fog.
Despite the immediate gestalt, the impression is created one
handmade “pixel” at a time -- Faruqee mixes more than a
hundred subtly shifting colors to create her illusions. Visually,
the paintings refer to the modular geometry of Islamic tile
work, pixilation of digital information, 1960’s optical painting
and the haze of Los Angeles. But the work is firmly rooted in
the systems of early conceptual art.

Each painting represents an heroic labor of inconceivable
precision, yet their scale exposes the “hand” and inevitable
irregularity in human endeavor. They are mementos of the
human ambition to understand, control and represent
phenomena -- and its futility.

Anoka Faruqee is a second-generation Bangladeshi-American
who lives and works in Los Angeles. This is her first solo
exhibition in New York.
 


 

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Fade to Gray Painting, 2006