NEW YORK, NY.- Ceres Gallery announces the upcoming solo exhibition “Selections from the New England Drawings” by
Christine Mottau, on view from October 28 through November 22 at 547 West 27th Street, Suite 201, New York, NY 10001. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, from 12 PM to 6 PM. An opening reception will be held on October 30 from 6 PM to 8 PM.
This exhibition marks Mottau’s tenth solo show with the gallery and features a selection of large-scale black and white abstractions that explore natural forms found from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, to Peterborough, New Hampshire. Created with oil on paper, these works investigate rhythmic relationships between line, form, and space, reflecting the artist’s ongoing engagement with both the physical landscape and her own perceptual experience.
The New England drawings interrogate the boundary between what is seen and what is remembered. Mottau’s abstractions are not simply translations of landscape into line and gesture—they are fields of inquiry; surfaces where spatial memory and sensory immediacy collide. Through her assertive mark-making, Mottau disrupts the comfort of representation, compelling us to engage with the architecture of experience itself. The forms, suggestive, provide a rhythm of geological time. The design of the forest and swamp vines, and the persistent geometry of stone. Yet, it is in the tension between boldness and restraint that her work finds its eloquence. Each drawing becomes a meditation on the act of perception: the way memory fractures and reconstructs place, the way physical form is constantly reframed by the act of looking.
The sense of monumentality here is psychological as much as physical. where abstraction of the landscape is never fixed but always becoming. In this sense, Mottau’s series is less about New England as a location than as a state of mind—a terrain mapped by memory, sensation, and the ongoing dialogue between observer and observed.
This is the first time the drawings, produced between 2002 and 2008, will be exhibited.
Christine Mottau has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in American galleries since the 1980s. She lives and works in New York City and Spencertown, NY, and studied at the Art Institute of Boston and the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. Her work, including paintings, drawings, and paper sculptures, is represented by Ceres Gallery.
For further information, please contact
Ceres Gallery at 212-947-6100 or email art@ceresgallery.org.