July 25, 2000

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

ANDREW MOCKLER

Friday, August 11 through Thursday, August 24

Opening Reception Friday, August 11 at 7:00 pm

New York artist Andrew Mockler's recent oil paintings and watercolors represent the extension of an activated visual field.  Around 1997, Mockler began to use the structure of the grid, as a kind of scaffolding, a way of reigning in his more gestural, emotional marks.  He was searching for a way of representing non-hierarchical space as a metaphor for moving through the world, for living in the present. 

Yet flickering over the present is memory.

Memories that have held great importance for me in my emotional and psychic life - impressions of forests, architecture, the seaside - are distilled in the act of painting,

becoming ruminations of an animated place.

These memories play off color theory and the simplicity of geometry, are brought into focus through color and structure. The stripes motif gives Mockler a scaffolding to anchor the color and fluid space of the brushwork.

My intention is to hold the viewer in the field of the painting to communicate that

heightened emotion, or awareness, brought on through focused contemplation.

By 1998, Mockler was moving into a looser structure; new elements were introduced.  The grids began to dissolve and the paintings seemed less arrangements and more wanderings, more meandering experience than focused expression, the forms emerging from the ground.  In a way, more countryside than cityscape.  The nice fit began to seep beyond the boundaries of the grid as Mockler came to awareness that life is not either/or.

            But only the continuum.  One event replacing another. No hierarchy.

            No preference.  Only moving from desire to desire.

Included in the exhibition are very new paintings that explore the refraction of light.  Mockler has become interested in using the depiction of the spectrum as a means to describe the complete set of visible colors.  He uses this construction as a world-within-a world, as his personal cosmology.  Also included will be a series of etchings relating to the paintings and exploring the passages between veils of color, veils of concealment and revelation.

Andrew Mockler currently serves as Lecturer and critic at Rhode Island School of Design and is on the faculty of the Fine Arts Work Center Summer Workshop. He   received his MFA from Yale University and his BFA from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.   He has been a visiting artist and instructor at Art New England workshop at Bennington College, New School for Social Research, Christie's New York Art Course, Cornell University and at Yale School of Art.  In 1990, he was a Fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.  He has had one person exhibitions at George Billis Gallery, New York; Julie Heller Gallery in Provincetown;

Hudson D. Walker Gallery at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown; Brickbottom Gallery, Somerville, MA.  Group exhibitions include 450 Gallery, New York, NY; Lamia Ink! New York; Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown; New Editions Fair, New York; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Water Street Studios, New York, among others.

Mockler's Jungle Press is a noted print workshop in New York City.

For further details and photographs, please call Wendelin Glatzel at The BOATHOUSE Gallery at 508-487-6096.

The BOATHOUSE Gallery is located in Provincetown's East End, on the beach, at the intersection of Bangs and Commercial Streets.