Artist Glenn Goldberg sat down with painter Mary DeVincentis during her recent solo show at Tappeto Volante Projects to explore the connections between personal experience and artistic expression. Their conversation reveals an artist whose work emerges from a lifetime of witnessing — from childhood visits to a state hospital where her mother worked as an art therapist, to her journey through loss and spiritual questioning. They discuss her latest series — paintings of solitary women who inhabit liminal spaces between memory and projection. DeVincentis discusses how her recent discovery of aphantasia — the inability to form mental images — has shaped her simplified visual vocabulary. She also draws inspiration from mythological women punished for disobedience, reimagining them as empowered by their behavior.
Tag: Tappeto Volante
Bascha Mon’s personal cosmopolis
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Tappeto Volante Gallery in Gowanus is audaciously hosting a condensed retrospective spanning decades of Bascha Mon’s painting, selected and arranged by the artist herself. Her more recent work dominates the gallery’s anterior space, with paintings from the 1970s – which remain integral to her ongoing inquiry – populating the rear room….
Nora Riggs: Charming and more
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Nora Riggs tells stories of our modern lives, recording their details. Her mindfully hung exhibition at Tappeto Volante, titled “Uneasy Listening,” traces how her paintings developed, beginning with four small gouaches placed on the lefthand wall of the front chamber. They appear as modest studies. But they also isolate anxious drama, such as that of a young woman searching for a missing earring on the dance floor, in a different way than the larger paintings in the main chamber do. The gouaches feel more interior, spotlighting vignettes, whereas the larger paintings pass searchlights over more expansive tales. Riggs’s gouaches also reveal her penchant for pattern and decoration, leading me suspect that she’s internalized the lessons of Matisse.