mona brody: distancing

Exhibition Dates: october 29 - november 23, 2019

Reception: friday, november 1, 6 - 8 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present, Distancing, a solo exhibition of paintings by Mona Brody in the Project Room. Shazzi Thomas, Director of the Painting Center curated the work from Brody’s most recent paintings. Distancing is about the unseen workings of middle space and time. The intentional quality of the sublime emerges at the heart of Brody’s work.

Metaphoric possibilities that result from Brody’s collection and observation of evocative objects, the space of the canvas, and the interaction of materials and application reveal the strange and uncanny place within the familiar. Her personal experience, writings, and biography shape the nature of the work, encouraging viewers to think about their own associations with themes of memory, personal histories, and time.

Tom Wachunas, art critic and contributor to ARTWACH writes about Brody’s work, “In considering alchemy as it might be applied to making abstract imagery, think of it as the practice of reconciling dualities or opposites: temporality and timelessness; permanence and ephemerality; the apparent and the implied; the literal and the metaphorical. Brody’s paintings are on one level really about the paint and, paradoxically enough, the paint transcending its paint-ness in the same way poetry employs words.”

Brody has exhibited both in the United States and internationally. Her solo exhibitions include The Painting Center, New York, NY, The President’s Gallery, Pratt Institute of Art, Brooklyn, NY, Utica College, Utica, NY, Kent State University, North Canton, Ohio, the Montclair Art Museum Montclair, NJ, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ. Nanjing College of Art, Nanjing, China, and Boleslawiec Art Museum, Boleslawiec, Poland.

Public collections that own her work include The Museum of Modern Art Library, New York, The Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ, The New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Rutgers State University, New Brunswick, NJ. Boleslawiec Art Museum, Boleslawiec, Poland, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweet Briar, VA and the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, NJ.

Brody’s fellowships and honors include Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, Rutgers State University, New Brunswick, NJ, Geraldine Dodge Foundation Artist Fellowships, The 33rd International Sculpture Symposium, Boleslawiec, Poland, and the 2015 Distinguished Alumna Award in Recognition of accomplishments in the Visual Arts, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, PA. Brody is a Professor of Art at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.