Bronlyn Jones + Robert Bauer
May 25 – September 8, 2024
The Center for Maine Contemporary Art is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition featuring work by Bronlyn Jones and Robert Bauer opening on Saturday, May 25th, 2024. Including intimate works made over the past several years, the exhibition is a meditation on chance, choice, and control.
Pairing sparse, geometric works with precisely rendered portraits and landscapes is perhaps, on the surface, counterintuitive but Jones and Bauer’s paintings and drawings share deep formal and conceptual connections. Powerful yet subtle movements, focused observations, and a slowing down of time come together to create an atmosphere of reverence for the subject, for the material, and the process.
The exhibition features several graphite drawings by both Jones and Bauer and this process is the root of the works on view. Jones’s attentive drawings in which she meticulously recreates the notebook pages of the likes of Ellsworth Kelly through delicate linework share a kinship with Bauer’s drawings of gardens and fields that show the history of Bauer’s decision-making through layers of softly placed and erased graphite. In fact, both Jones and Bauer use erasure as a tool to distill their works to their most potent essences, mindfully removing the extraneous and keeping only the necessary.
About the artists:
Bronlyn Jones works abstractly, using finely drawn lines and meticulously painted shapes to build her minimal compositions. Her work is beautifully simple and poetic with a limited palette of rich blacks, soft whites, silvery graphite, and the natural grain of her wood panels. Often coming in pairs or trios, Jones’s paintings and drawings open a conversation on how subtle shifts – the small tilt of a shape, an opening or closing – can completely change the mood and meaning of a work. Encased in simple frames made by Robert Bauer, Jones’s paintings and drawings featured in the exhibition invite the viewer to look slowly. There are entire worlds to glean from even the smallest of Jones’s marks.
Robert Bauer’s careful drawings and paintings depict family, friends, and landscapes in direct and unaffected ways. Quiet and sensitively rendered, their complexity is revealed slowly: proportions are mapped out; marks are made and removed. The work is done from direct observation as well as pencil studies and photographs. In his portraits, Bauer’s subjects – almost always friends and family – rarely make eye contact allowing for a deeply intimate viewing experience: the viewer is free to observe each detail at their own pace. His landscapes are equally open, their panoramic views offering plenty to take in. Jewel-like and encased in simple frames built by Bauer, the works are near mathematical in their rendering and each piece is simultaneously intimate and vast, still and vibrant.
Touching on numerous art historical references like the delightfully dutiful grids of Agnes Martin, Lucian Freud’s honest and vivid portraits, and the scrupulous depictions of vastness by Vija Celmins, Jones and Bauer’s paintings and drawings are having a conversation about deep and sincere observation: how can we truly understand what we behold? How can we retain only the essential and what do we need to let go of to do so? In Jones’s Erasure List, a finely typed text list with graphite, the path is laid out for us: what is left out, what is unnecessary, what is resisted, what is inessential, what is rejected, what is too easily said, what is glib, what is overstated, what is edited, what is left unsaid.
About the curator:
Annika Earley is an artist and curator. She holds an MFA from Maine College of Art as well as an M.Phil from College of the Atlantic and has been a resident at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in Rockland, ME, Hewnoaks Artist Colony in Lovell, ME, Monson Arts in Monson, ME, Pace House Residency in Stonington, ME, and the Walkaway House in North Adams, MA. Earley has been supported by the St. Botolph Foundation in Boston, MA, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Albert K, Murray Fund, and SPACE Gallery’s American Rescue Plan Grant. Earley’s work is in the collections of the University of Southern Maine and the College of the Atlantic and has been most recently exhibited at THIS Gallery in Vancouver, Canada. She has curated exhibitions at Able Baker Contemporary, Speedwell Contemporary, and Zero Station in Portland, Maine. Originally from rural Switzerland, Earley now lives in mid-coast Maine.
Header image: Robert Bauer, Isabel, tempera on gessoed paper, 12 x 10 inches, 2014.
Footer image: Bronlyn Jones, Untitled, Oil on gessoed paper, mounted on a 3/4″ birch panel in artist’s handmade frame, 10 7/8 x 9 1/4 inches, 2022.