ANNETTE DAVIDEK
GALLERY HENOCH 555 WEST 25TH STREET NEW YORK, NY 10001 917.305.0003 info@galleryhenoch.com galleryhenoch.com
Cover: #21-07, Oil on Birch Panel, 42” x 48”
#18-12, Oil on Birch Panel, 32” x 38”
#21-13, Oil on Birch Panel, 38” x 32”
#21-06, Oil on Birch Panel, 32” x 38”
Annette Davidek: More is Found, More is Waiting Looking at Annette Davidek’s paintings gives one the opportunity to enter another world. Painted with oil on birch panel, they function as portals or windows into a space that is somehow familiar as it is strange. I found myself drawn to the layers of paint that upon close inspection reveal delicate brush strokes and, in some instances, the grain of the wood surface. Her color palette consists of many subtleties and shifts between shapes. There are at least three proposed layers, sometimes more, alluding to depth that only the artist can determine. As one work evolves into another, there is a continuity between paintings. Some of her motifs are repeated, only later to be obliterated by gauzy curtains — thin transparent washes of oil paint. The organic shapes emulating sea urchins, spindly jelly fish, dandelion poofs, sunflowers, and dangling Spanish moss are visually soothing. The lines and shapes feature no sharp edges. I’m reminded of my brief time in Earth Science class as a seventh grader, peering through a microscope into a microscopic world. It’s as if Davidek has a fast-track to this invisible space and can zero in on the unseen, making it legible. Her lines are curved, and nothing is severed within the rectangular panel unless stopped by the edge. A fascinating quality of the environments she makes is that they are completely imagined. The paintings speak for themselves in a silent yet colorful language. Georgia O’Keefe may have said it best when she stated, “I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t
say any other way —things I had no words for.” In fact, painting doesn’t need written or spoken words to be brought into fruition. It relies on a maker, a vision and the goal to finish something, the artist’s prerogative to define their stopping point. The title of the exhibition, More is Found, More is Waiting, alludes to the nearly endless stratum of life. If we were to conceptually lift the skin, fur, sand of the seabed, numerous paved roads in cities across the globe, what would we find? Buried treasures, discarded pennies, family trees that extend millennia, and more…beyond human perception. For Davidek and many artists, the narrative of obsession is the driving force behind their work. It’s an internal narrative, one they may or may not be aware of, that looks like color and deliciously imprisons the mind until it’s extracted. This drive to want to make something to share with others through semiotic means is not new and expands as far back as the prehistoric age when cave men and women scribbled on stone walls. Davidek’s practice feels fresh, cooling, and encompassing. The mythology of painted space is much more imaginative than virtual space, even if static. Massimiliano Gioni, Artistic Director of the New Museum, once said, “We need to remind ourselves that contemporary art is first of all a form of conceptual gymnastics, in which we learn to coexist with what we don’t understand.” Maybe it is in this realm of non-understanding where we find something bigger, something better. Katy Diamond Hamer
#21-12, Oil on Birch Panel, 38” x 32”
#21-08, Oil on Birch Panel, 42” x 48”