Pull
Danielle Mysliwiec
January 16 - 31, 2023
Pull III, 2022
Oil on linen covered wood panel
52 x 36 in (132.1 x 91.4 cm)
COUNTY is pleased to present Pull, a solo exhibition by Danielle Mysliwiec.
Mysliwiec is a contemporary abstract painter who explores the malleable properties of oil paint and the metaphorical potential of abstraction. It was during a 2021 Surf Point Foundation residency in Maine that the artist began creating a series of blue gradients which evolved into the present suite of paintings. They were inspired, in part, by the vastness and ceaseless energy of the ocean as ways of contemplating the nature of change.
Mysliwiec chose a hue of phthalo blue many magnitudes more vibrant than the steely blue-greys of the New England coastline and one that would retain its vibrancy even when tinted with white. More than the look of the ocean, Mysliwiec considered the physics of waves and tides, the process of erosion, and correspondences she saw between the actions of the ocean and her own mark-making process. These porous high-relief paintings, reminiscent of woven textiles, are made by hand-mixing oil paint, then extruding it through a specialized tool. It is a meticulous, physically demanding process, and the paintings in Pull are her largest to date. As she pulls lines of paint through the extruding tool, moving slowly and systematically from the upper left corner of the canvas to the lower right, each mark rises and recedes, replicating in miniature the endless push and pull of waves against the shoreline.
Although Mysliwiec’s work is process-based and systematic, it is also intuitive. She never measures the lengths of her marks, nor the proportions of paint that she mixes, allowing instead for variations in form and color that feel organic, even poetic. When moving from lighter tints to more deeply saturated ones, she deliberately creates moments of transition that stand out when viewed from afar but that are difficult to perceive up close, causing our perception of color to shift according to our relative proximity while reversing the common-sense notion that closer inspection necessarily equates to greater knowledge. Sometimes, clarity only comes with distance. For Mysliwiec, this perceptual shift is a visual metaphor for how we perceive change in our lives. “Even when shocking things happen or a paradigm shift occurs that feels radical and sudden,” she says, “when you reflect on it, you realize it’s been happening in incremental micro-moments that were building toward that moment of realization or visibility.” The paintings in Pull are meditations on change, and the more closely we scrutinize them, the more their mystery deepens.
Danielle Mysliwiec holds an MFA from Hunter College. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Novella Gallery (New York) and Vox Populi Gallery (Philadelphia) and in group exhibitions at McKenzie Fine Art, Asya Geisberg Gallery, Mixed Greens Gallery, and Transmitter Gallery (New York); Rockelmann & (Berlin); COUNTY (Palm Beach); Heiner Contemporary and Project 4 (Washington, DC); Baer Ridgway Exhibitions and Chandra Cerrito Contemporary (San Francisco); and The Center for Craft, Creativity and Design (Asheville, NC), among others. Her work has been reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, Art Fag City, The Washington Post, B’more Art, and The San Francisco Examiner. Recent awards include a fully-funded residency to the Surf Point Foundation and the Pollack Krasner Fellowship at The Vermont Studio Center. She has received grants from the DC Arts and Humanities Commission and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County. Mysliwiec has also been a contributing writer to The Brooklyn Rail. She sits on the board of Interlude Artist Residency, a residency for parent artists in Livingston, New York.
Logan R. Beitmen