The Shape of Color brings together a group of seven contemporary artists working within the mode of abstraction that highlight the role of color and light in nonrepresentational painting today. Each artist possesses a unique lexicon that invites experiential responses through their use of material, surface, support, and scale that give way to plays in chromatic perception. Distinctions in density, vibrancy, saturation, and matteness, alongside interactions between tones are visualized in rhythmic gestural movements or tight architectures of space, giving form and structure to color.

Marina Adams (b. 1960, Orange, NJ) has developed a dynamic and abstract painterly practice of clear and powerful formal language that centers around exploring the possibilities of shape and movement. She displays the structural power of color while also embracing gesturalism and improvisation. As curator Helga Christoffersen says, Adams’ “work demands silence, enabling us to think and dream and create space.”

Jean-Baptiste Bernadet (b. 1978, Paris, France) employs organized, subtly multi-colored painted strokes in his series of grid-like paintings. Eliciting a play of light and color, they exude an ethereal quality like that of a fleeting memory of the luminosity and intensity of a place and period. With the regularity of their marks in succession, they also conjure the passage of time or music with the works exuding a harmony in their scale and composition.

Marley Freeman (b. 1981, Lynn, MA) creates a distinct and meticulous vocabulary of expressive forms using hand-mixed gesso, acrylics, and oils. Her investigations into color and light transcend divisions between abstraction and representation with fluctuations between transparency and opacity, sparseness and density, luminosity and austerity, building a patchwork of jostling forms that emphasize the expressive materiality of Freeman’s materials.

Joe Fyfe (b. 1952, New York, NY) makes paintings that play with the conventions of openness and structure, improvisation and deliberation. He applies gestural brushstrokes onto discarded scraps then affixes them to freshly sized canvas, cutting holes of similar shapes into the supports to create a continuous plane and also repurposing distressed industrial signage. The works are nonrepresentational, emphasizing physicality and color while allowing the materials to dominate the compositions.

Nathlie Provosty (b. 1981, Cincinnati, OH) forms finely tuned oil paintings that engage highly subtle modes of perception. Matte and reflective textures, tight and loose strokes, and ghostly and bold shapes sensuously interplay with light as well as the environment, inspiring a circumnavigation within the viewing experience. Conceptually, Provosty’s paintings mirror the contradictory patterning of human communication, enacting its paradox while providing a rich visual encounter.

Julia Rommel (b. 1980, Salisbury, MD) enlists the fundamental task of preparing a piece of linen for painting — stretching and folding, priming and sanding, stapling edges — as a starting point for composition. The resulting physicality of the surface disrupts gesture and the search for optical space, allowing chance and accident to impact every move. Each work becomes a multi-layered play between the artist’s intentions and material fact. 

Pamela Helena Wilson (b.1954, New York, NY) produces a varied cadence in each of her paintings allowing either a stillness that emerges from the color and form, or swift movement across the canvas through mark. Although the final surfaces are thinly painted, the images develop in many layers, each one informing the next. Together these assemble into a visually rich abstracted architecture of space, inviting emotional and experiential response.