KNOKKE.- Maruani Mercier will present Light As Space featuring the work of three prolific American artists: Marina Adams, Joanne Greenbaum, and Anne Truitt. This is the second group show organized for the gallery by New York-based curator Raymond Foye, who explains, “Contemporary art is inextricably linked to context and precedence. One of the pleasures of a group show is examining the connections, influences, and reverberations of artistic circumstances.”

The exhibition title is taken from Truitt’s description of her work, with its connotations of luminosity, colour, and volume. The artists in this show remind us that the values of freedom begin on the most personal level; they also remind us that developing a personal aesthetic and insisting on its legitimate place in the world is part of the struggle of the artist. Each of these artists has found a way to harmonize colour, light and structure into complex visual music that resonates across time.

Marina Adams (b. 1960) synthesizes a wide range of influences in her work, from music to architecture to textiles. Although working in a non-figurative mode, physicality and movement are integral to her work. Her strong commitment to the important social role of art in furthering progressive values remains a fundamental inspiration, and integral to her notion of artistic expression. She reduces the work down to its essentials, allowing space for all the senses. Rather than a purely optical matter, the artist understands painting as the manifestation of intangibles such as temperament, sensibility, intellect, and research.

Joanne Greenbaum (b. 1953) has been an important painter in the lineage of the New York School, a tradition of studio-based painting where the work is the result of direct engagement with self, authenticity, and human existence. “To me, painting is limitless; I don’t need to ironically quote modernist styles or modes of abstraction,” Greenbaum has said. Often using drawing as the springboard for her paintings, Greenbaum formulates a vital relationship between the two approaches which ultimately reflects her own unique vocabulary of line and volume.

Anne Truitt (1921 – 2004) was an American sculptor whose work bridges color field and minimalism, while belonging to neither. Truitt’s sensibility drew from disparate sources: her friendship with Clement Greenberg and Kenneth Noland, her love of Marcel Proust, and three years in Japan (where her husband served with the U.S. Department of State). She exhibited at the Andre Emmerich Gallery and was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anne Truitt: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961—1973 in 1974.