Margie Neuhaus is an artist based in Brooklyn, whose work is inspired by the study of natural and manmade systems.
She has had solo exhibitions in Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project Space (Bronx, NY) and at Safe-T-Gallery (Brooklyn, NY). Her work has been exhibited locally and nationally at venues such as Socrates Sculpture Park; P.S.122 Gallery, New York; A + D Gallery (Chicago); Islip Art Museum (East Islip, NY); Franconia Sculpture Park (Minnesota); Rockland Center for the Arts (West Nyack, NY); Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, (Cazenovia, NY); Convergence XI (Providence, RI); and Fields Sculpture Park at Omi International Arts Center (Ghent, NY). Her exhibitions have been reviewed in the New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, and Ducts.org. Neuhaus has received residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Socrates Sculpture Park, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sculpture Space, Ragdale Foundation and Trestle Gallery & Art Space, Brooklyn, NY. Neuhaus received an MFA in Sculpture from Bard College and a BFA in from Carnegie Mellon University. She currently teaches at New Jersey City University and LaGuardia Community College and is a Residency Advisor at Trestle Art Space.
This exhibition 'LINEAMENTS' showcases a series of drawings, weavings, and sculptural reliefs. Line, space, materials, and process are central to the work. They individually and collectively express a range of concepts, ideas, emotions, and feelings.
The artist's interest in the physicality of a line and what is revealed through the materiality and the process of how it is made: the speed, trace, implied movement, recorded direction, lightness, softness, feel, color, and variations.
Both the works on paper and the woven fabric are the result of a set of parameters and decisions that govern actions and time. Drawing on paper allows the artist to explore and experiment. There is a simplicity to the stripped-down aspect of pencil, charcoal, watercolor graphite, or ink on paper. Some lines are inspired by ones seen in the built environment and others are found by focused drawings done on paper or a loom, within a selected set of boundaries such as time, action, materials, and process.
The textiles embody the paradox of structural logic and spontaneous gestures of individual threads. Neuhaus establishes a system that supports and highlights uniquely delineated individual variation and looseness in weavings.
Color, surface, texture, and materials are one. Meaning is communicated by the haptic realm of the materials and the means by which it is made.
" I integrate various spatial concepts to create works that explore dissonance, harmony, stability, vulnerability and ephemeral states. The work explores continuity and change within a system, as reflected in natural and manmade structures. I examine notions of emptiness, linear disruptions, ideas of chance and impermanence.
My work investigates different phenomena and textures and contrasts the ethereal with the constructed.
I am interested in things that are fragile, spontaneous, and feel humble.
I create works with a certain tone of lightness to evoke a sense of contemplation, so viewers perceive space, air, and structure in new and different ways."
- Margie Neuhaus, 2020
For more information about the artist, please visit www.margieneuhaus.com.