Modern Arts Midtown kicks off its fall season on September 1 with a focus on two perennial favorites: painters Graceann Warn and Larry Roots. Each has been at work creating new paintings for this exhibition, stretching their personal explorations within the scales of abstraction.
Warn, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, will be showing her encaustic paintings on panel as well as a range of small compositions arranged in a modular format. Inspired by words, phrases, scientific and mathematical concepts, Warn builds up her surfaces in layers of varying opacity and translucency that obscure or reveal embedded drawings and marks. Her beeswax and oil mediums give her paintings a warmth and depth towards her goal of expressing the accumulations and erasures of time.
Roots, who is also MAM gallery owner/director, will exhibit new acrylic on canvas paintings, including several on a large scale. There is a delicate atmospheric quality to Roots’ compositions in which calligraphic cyphers and painterly gestures dance and float across open fields of color. Roots is a master of diverse mark-making, often with a certain cool reserve, and his paintings in this show promise no less an exposition.
Inquiry: New Work by Graceann Warn and Larry Roots opens on Friday, September 1 with a reception from 6-8pm, and continues until September 28 at Modern Arts Midtown, 3615 Dodge Street. For further information, contact 402/502-8737 or visit www.modernartsmidtown.com