Medrie macphee biography of george
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Medrie MacPhee
March 15 – April 19, 2025
The Spider Holds A Silver Ball
April 26 – May 31, 2025
Shirley Jaffe - Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson Sarah McEneaney - Ann Toebbe
September 9 – 11, 2022
Helen Adam, Wallace Berman, Bruce Conner, Jean Conner, George Herms, Jess, Lawrence Jordan, Patricia Jordan, Dean Stockwell
July 17 – September 2, 2021
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Inner Workings: Works on Paper by David Humphrey and Medrie MacPhee
About
Medrie MacPhee and David Humphrey both make insistent, confrontational work, yet at first, they seem like very different kinds of artists. Humphrey’s brash configurations include recognizable images that collide with self-sufficient elements, presented in a bred range of pictorial languages. MacPhee’s solemn compositions are abstract, tense conversations among generous shapes that seem autonomous, mutable, and vaguely anthropomorphic. Over time, however, we discover increasing common ground between the two artists. In formal terms, both deploy a vocabulary of suave curves and expressive drawing, played against the edges of the support, and both elicit maximum expression from contrasting textures, varied paint applications, unpredictable patterns, and encounters between line and expanse.
In terms of content, MacPhee and Humphrey are also close. Humphrey pulls his motifs and images from vernacular culture
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Contributed by Medrie MacPhee / Susanna Heller and I have been friends going all the way back to the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design [NASCAD] in Halifax from which I graduated in 1976, and Susanna in 1977. Our first studios in New York were our first apartments, mine on 3rd St. in the East Village and hers on 5th. Our lives consisted largely of many a night of visiting each other’s studios, museum and gallery visits, and talking painting, painting, painting. We encouraged each other, critiqued each other’s work and reinforced each other’s total commitment to being artists- something essential at that time in an art world largely devoid of women.
Her devotion to painting and recording the experience of “being”– over the forty seven years of our friendship — never wavered. On a drawing she completed after the World Trade Centers were attacked [and where she had only just completed a residency] she writes:
“In 1998-99 I shared s