Artist: Fran Shalom

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts presents Everyday Improvisations, an exhibition of new abstract paintings by Fran Shalom. This is her fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Quirky, ambiguous figures inhabit Fran Shalom’s paintings. Their bright, cartoony colors and buoyant forms fill each composition with playful energy. Her shapes, while fully abstract, reference the body and recognizable objects. She thinks of them as, “ambiguous characters who inhabit my studio keeping me company and often engaging in silent conversation.” Animated and boisterous Shalom’s characters are evocative of the familiar but remain just out of reach.

A jaunty line meanders and encircles Shalom’s unruly shapes. Central forms and pared-down backgrounds echo icons. She gravitates to simple shapes and hard edges but builds depth through textured surfaces. Painting improvisationally, she adds and subtracts - building, wiping, scraping, and reshaping. This revealing and covering creates layered imagery. In many works, fields of rich color are interrupted by traces of past hues and ghosts of earlier forms.

Fran Shalom has exhibited widely throughout the United States, including solo shows at Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, MA, and Hunterdon Museum, Clinton, NJ. She is a recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant and residencies at MacDowell Fellowship and Art Omi. Her work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Rose Art Museum, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. She is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts.