Nicholas Metivier Gallery is excited to present The Edge of the Alphabet, an exhibition of new paintings by Medrie MacPhee opening on Saturday, April 26th. This is MacPhee’s third solo exhibition at the gallery. There will be an opening reception with the artist in attendance on Saturday, April 26th from 1-3 PM. Please RSVP here.
“In the same way that the decoding of hieroglyphics made an ancient language knowable to us – great abstract painting is another form of decoding. It speaks to some kind of fundamental relationship between our experience of the visible and the invisible dimensions of being.” - Medrie MacPhee
Medrie MacPhee’s captivating new body of work, The Edge of the Alphabet, is a series of spirited and nuanced paintings on panel. Smaller in scale than previous works in this medium, they unfold like visual poems and evoke everything from musical compositions to landscapes - each work tells a unique story. MacPhee’s strong use of intuitive colour is underscored by her foundation of collaged clothing, a part of her process that quietly makes itself known over time.
MacPhee aligns these recent works with painted objects rather than traditional two-dimensional paintings because of their prominent texture and relief. In some instances, she enhances the texture by infusing paint with pumice. The uniform scale and cohesiveness of The Edge of the Alphabet, encourages a semiotic reading, like a deck of tarot cards. It extends MacPhee’s ongoing interest in “words as complex objects, as forms that hold within them weight, structure, memory, emotion, and association,” as well as the realm beyond words that MacPhee has referred to as a “subterranean level of feeling.”
Medrie MacPhee is based in New York. She was born in Edmonton and attended NSCAD in the 1970s. She has exhibited in Canada and the US for over four decades. Museum collections include the Metropolitan Museum, NY; the McMichael Canadian Art Collection; the National Gallery of Canada; the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; the Art Gallery of Ontario, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, the Palmer Museum of Art, PA; the Asheville Museum, NC. MacPhee is the recipient of numerous awards including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize Awards, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, and a Pollock-Krasner Award. MacPhee is a fellow of The National Academy of Design and Emeritus Professor of Art, Bard College.
