Fox Hysen
Cherry
March 30 – May 26, 2024
Cherry
March 30 – May 26, 2024
Cherry is a series of hybrid works employing painting and collage, each bound by an artist-made cherry wood frame. Grounded in landscape, this work began as a series of plein air watercolor sketches made during a recent trip to Umbria, Italy.
The cherry wood frames, initially made by the artist to house this series, became a material provocation: Hysen’s response to the intensity of the deep red wood frames is to rework the watercolor sketches on paper with collaged parts within and on top of the frame. The compositional device unlocked in the process splits the area within the wood and reasserts the grounding, deep space of landscape over the confinement of framing.
The effect is formally and materially one of a buckle, like one found on a belt, a briefcase, or a leather bag. Invoking the touchable durability of leather objects, Hysen’s interweaving of watercolor paper elements causes a material equivocation: the wood, offering the stable containment of furniture, takes on a sensuous tactility alongside shapes and contours of the recomposed watercolor sketches on handmade paper.
Fox Hysen was born in the Bay Area, California and currently lives and works in Norfolk, Connecticut. She is full-time faculty at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting, the graduate program at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her work explores the relationship between composition and bodily perception. The conventions of landscape, the linearity of writing, the abstract space of the grid and sensuality of organic and built forms are drawn in combination with her style of direct, gestural mark-making. Hysen’s playful and open-ended practice manifests in a variety of different types of painterly objects. The raw materiality of these objects are experienced in tension with their organization into readable spaces. Awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022 and the Tournesol Award at the Headland’s Center for the Arts in 2016. She earned her MFA from Yale University (2015) and BFA from NYU (2006). Most recently she has shown her work with Below Grand gallery in New York.
The cherry wood frames, initially made by the artist to house this series, became a material provocation: Hysen’s response to the intensity of the deep red wood frames is to rework the watercolor sketches on paper with collaged parts within and on top of the frame. The compositional device unlocked in the process splits the area within the wood and reasserts the grounding, deep space of landscape over the confinement of framing.
The effect is formally and materially one of a buckle, like one found on a belt, a briefcase, or a leather bag. Invoking the touchable durability of leather objects, Hysen’s interweaving of watercolor paper elements causes a material equivocation: the wood, offering the stable containment of furniture, takes on a sensuous tactility alongside shapes and contours of the recomposed watercolor sketches on handmade paper.
Fox Hysen was born in the Bay Area, California and currently lives and works in Norfolk, Connecticut. She is full-time faculty at the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting, the graduate program at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her work explores the relationship between composition and bodily perception. The conventions of landscape, the linearity of writing, the abstract space of the grid and sensuality of organic and built forms are drawn in combination with her style of direct, gestural mark-making. Hysen’s playful and open-ended practice manifests in a variety of different types of painterly objects. The raw materiality of these objects are experienced in tension with their organization into readable spaces. Awards include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022 and the Tournesol Award at the Headland’s Center for the Arts in 2016. She earned her MFA from Yale University (2015) and BFA from NYU (2006). Most recently she has shown her work with Below Grand gallery in New York.