Artists feel connection to the work of masters - Bradenton Herald - by Joan Altabe - September 20, 2007
Continuing Education: Greene Contemporary pairs a Ringling alum with a Ringling prof - Creative Loafing - by Megan Voeller - September 6, 2007
Contrast in styles in Greene exhibits - Sarasota Herald-Tribune - by Kevin Costello - September 2, 2007
Nicole Mauser will be showing new work in an exhibition titled "Second Adolescence" at Greene Contemporary the month of September 2007. An opening on Friday, September 7 from 6 to 9 pm will preview the exhibition that will run from Saturday September 8 through Saturday September 29.
In making the new abstract paintings for her show in September, Mauser has been looking at her previous work and thinking how to move beyond it. She has noted that some of her early work was very frontal so in "Hot Air" she was interested in "putting planes in front of planes and looking at the plane from above." In another work she moves beyond the comfort of her square format into a horizontal composition that is 40 inches high by 56 inches wide. To her the horizontal work looks "more filmic" or perhaps cinematic. Mauser likes to "make one work complicated and the next one a simpler distillation of the ideas" she tackled in the one before.
Describing her process of making work Mauser says she is constantly weighing and balancing the organic and inorganic. She considers the square of the masonite panel inorganic and the paint on the surface organic. Mauser thinks it is important for the viewer "to see the hand" or gesture of the artist in her work.
Mauser creates "non-objective imagery." She likes color and when her "color is particularly visceral" it relates to her "processed experience of daily life." One painting of her new series is called "trappings" and relates to the "stuff" we choose to surround us for reasons of pleasure or comfort. The volume of her brushwork and marks on the surface of her work become a metaphor for how "our stuff increases and multiplies without our being focused on it."
Mauser has been looking at the work of Edouard Manet and Joan Mitchell. Manet interests her because he used "lots of black and dark colors" and her new work has a good deal of black in it as well. An artist who inspired her as an undergraduate and who became one of her mentors was the late Leslie Lerner who taught painting at Ringling School. Mauser sees her new work as more baroque - more dynamic, theatrical and curvilinear than it has been in the past. For Mauser her work is as much about the process and her journey as it is about the end result - the painting.
Recently, Mauser has been thinking a great deal about philosophy and empiricism or the theory of knowledge emphasizing the role of experience in the formation of an idea. She is investigating these ideas in combination with thinking about the philosophy of science and observations of the natural world.
Mauser graduated from Ringling School of Art & Design in 2006. She was born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1983 and now lives in Kansas City, Missouri. She has shown work at the Centre pour l'arte et la culture in Aix-en-Provence, France and at AR Contemporary in Milan, Italy. She is represented exclusively by Greene Contemporary in Sarasota where she had her last show in May 2006.