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Abstraction – Extracting From the World
Millennium Galleries, Sheffield, UK
Organized by David Thorp
February 08 – June 03, 2007

David Batchelor, Sarah Morris, Haluk Akakçe, Bjørn Melhus, Mustafa Hulusi, James Hutchenson, Rupert Norfold, Nicole Wermers, Martin Boyce, Oswaldo Macia, Mary Heilmann, Ann Pibal, Maya Roos, Anselm Reyle, Juan Uslé

Painting remains the most enduring medium available to the artist. the history of abstract painting is one in which artists used larger and larger can vases to paint on in order to engulf the spectator in the presence of their paintings. One of the younger generation of American abstract artists, Ann Pibal, however, frequently paints on a small scale. Concern with a grand scale is something that she has reacted against preferring instead the intimacy that the small paintings provide. Pibal’s paintings usually consist of a linear image on a coloured background sometimes appearing to reflect parts of the image back on itself. The range of colors she uses in each painting is usually limited to two or three as she uses different tones of the same color to make subtle shifts and graduations in her images. The finished paintings have very little physical presence because they are painted by Pibal on thin but robust specially prepared aluminum sheet. This gives the finished works a physically light weight presence. The two paintings on show in the exhibition, Tuff Stuff and X are both from 2005 and, although they may at first appear just to be about the pictorial dynamics of line and color, like all Pibal’s painting they are inspired by feelings that she has had for things or events in the world. In this she inherits Mary Heilmann’s interest and approach to abstraction.

– David Thorpe