Marcus Herse

JB Jurve is pleased to announce the first Los Angeles solo exhibition of Vanessa Conte.

The works presented in this exhibition are the conclusions of the artist’s investigations of the ability of painting to have the immediacy of the drawing process, develop intuitively, and act true to the character of the painted mark, be it a gesture or a planned event. At the same time, Conte is exploring narrative’s ability to be implied by simple associations, be absorbed in several visual ways simultaneously (color, gesture, texture), and be understood without human likeness.

Conte looks to historical precedents like Art Informel, CoBRA, comic art, Chinese landscape traditions, Eva Hesse, Helen Frankenthaller, and Elizabeth Murray as models of personal mythology and technical sensitivity to physical and psychic impulses. She draws on this history to ground her experiments in painting’s ability to convey psychological meaning using unique, intuitive forms.

Sixteen Days on Europa is a journey. The fifteen canvases are uniformly formatted (36 x 44 inches) and hung in two rows around the gallery. The paintings are grouped to set up a narrative reading, which can follow a linear climactic panorama of an epic tale or just as easily be individual vignettes of interaction. Rounded horizon lines and peaked and creviced surfaces grow into the backgrounds of globular and crystallized character shapes.

Vanessa Conte has had solo exhibitions at Daniela Steinfeld/Van Horn, Düsseldorf, Germany and has been included in group exhibitions at MUHKA, Antwerp, Belgium, Kunstmuseum Baden, Solingen, Germany, KIT, Düsseldorf, and the Torrance Art Museum. Vanessa Conte lives and works in Glendale, California.