Gallery 2112 proudly presents Modalities, a solo exhibition of recent paintings by Bill Hill, who is known for his exploratory approach to color and representation that reaches back to his study and friendship with Washington Color School artists Sam Gilliam, Leon Berkowitz, Simon Governeur, and Gene Davis.

The new paintings began as improvisation, and each painting grew more structured as Hill’s thinking about the work intensified. His influences are vast and various: the music of John Cage, Ornette Coleman’s live albums (in tribute to Gilliam, an ardent fan), Finnegan’s Wake, mist and sunlight, how ancient stories resurface. “The associations build,” Hill says, while maintaining that the work is open for each viewer’s experience, with space for impressions to flutter, converse, and coalesce.

Hill grew up working in tobacco fields in Charles County, Maryland, and his paintings are strongly influenced by the land and the culture. Agricultural cycles, the red-violet earth, and his sense of his fellow workers who followed the region’s harvests fed Hill’s understanding that color is a vehicle for history, stories, and radiant thought. Charles County is also where Hill met the work of James Joyce, whose convention-defiant writing would become his lifelong companion. Upon reading the first three chapters of Ulysses, Hill was “hooked forever. This guy is a magician. He sees the connections,” he says.

Bill Hill was born in Washington, DC, and moved to the rural splendor of southern Maryland in grade school. He studied painting with Douglas Wilson at Carnegie Mellon, and then returned to DC where he furthered his study of color with Gilliam, Berkowitz, and other legends.

Gallery 2112 is pleased to present Mary Early’s first solo exhibition of works on paper and wood panel. Early’s work over the last two decades has come to include drawings and schematics as an essential component in the development of temporary installation and site-specific works in beeswax. These schematic drawings serve as a durable and lasting precursor to the installation process, from conception through completion.

“When preparing a drawing surface, whether on paper or wood panel, I begin with a light set of marks to create a grid – this grid provides a matrix for the placement of lines. I work in series, with the idea that an infinite number and combination of elements exist. Through drawing, I am able to plan complicated installations in advance and visualize the different possibilities offered by a single space.”

Mary Early: Līnea Studies includes a series of recent works in oil stick and sumi ink wash on paper, oil stick on wood panel, and Līnea XII, the twelfth in an ongoing series of vertical linear works begun in 2017. Līnea XII, a hanging work in beeswax, occupies the circular bay window of the gallery space, creating a louvered partition between the interior and the street.

Mary Early (born 1975, Washington, DC) lives and works in Washington, DC. She studied visual art, film, and video at Bennington College, and her work has been exhibited at the United States Botanic Garden, Washington Project for the Arts, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Second Street Gallery, Hemphill Fine Arts, Galerie Im Ersten, Kloster Schloss Salem, Kunstlerbund Tubingen, the American University Museum, and the Sun Valley Museum of Art, among other regional and national galleries. Early’s work is included in the collections of the US Department of State/Embassy of Panama and Embassy of Jordan, the District of Columbia Art Bank, the American University Museum (Corcoran Collection).

Gallery 2112 is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Maryanne Pollock’s latest paintings titled Rebirth the Earth, all completed during the pandemic. Featured in this exhibition are five abstract paintings, three botanical works on paper, and more than 18 abstract mixed-media works on paper culled from kinesis of travel from her studios in NYC and DC. Showing, October 1 - November 14, 2001.

The nature paintings are derived from plein air landscapes of Central and Riverside Parks, and the US Botanical Gardens, continuing her interest in Divine Geometry. This pandemic proved Olmstead, the 19th century Central Park landscape architect, a visionary. Central Park, which serves as the lungs of NYC, and other public spaces like the US capitol grounds, became sanctuaries to reimagine the function of nature to remediate our bodies, minds, souls, and the environment.

Favorite artists Robert Rauschenberg and Russian suprematist Malevich, saw white as a color of potential. However, Pollock sees the void of black as the origin of all life, the fertile soil. Metallic totems and luminous explosions emerge dramatically from the carbon black backgrounds almost like supernovas, or new cosmic energies.

The 4’x4’ featured painting of this solo exhibition, Rebirth the Earth, began as an emotional reaction to the US response to Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria. Later, through her practice of transcendental meditation, layers of buoyant silver and blue cells, like mini earths appeared.

A mentor of Pollock’s, abstract expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart said, “Art transcends, transforms nature, creates a nature beyond nature.” Pollock’s paintings are inner landscapes, derived from the practice of transcendental meditation, where individual cells of living energy become nascent to the visible world. It’s the energy of the potential of all things that keeps us connected—the silver thread of vibrancy.

BIOGRAPHY

Maryanne Pollock received her BFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and Rome, Italy. She continued studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Corcoran College of Art and Design and American University.

She represented the United States in a contextual exhibition at the 54th Venice Biennale, at the Arts in Embassies Program in Egypt, and had solo exhibitions in Paris, Glasgow, Basel, and Cairo. Permanent collections include Marriott Marquis DC, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, Inova Schar Cancer Institute, Qatar Foundation and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Recent exhibitions include Delaware Contemporary Museum and the McLean Project for the Arts and a National competition curated by Jennifer Farrell, curator from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and currently a Benefit Exhibition in Philadelphia with Bridgette Mayer Gallery.