Anne Sherwood Pundyk: "Beauty Out of Bounds"

Solo Exhibition

East End Arts

Riverhead, NY

March 23 to May 5, 2024

View exhibition artwork here.

A full-color catalogue for "Beauty Out of Bounds" is available here.

“Beauty Out of Bounds” presents work made outside convention. As a young girl I understood intuitively how to shape simple materials such as fabric and string to ground my wild thoughts. Much later I found I could adapt these everyday forms to make fine art. Operating beyond tradition has been hard won over many decades. Now my unstretched paintings slip free from expectation.

“Beauty Out of Bounds” serves as an overview of my decade of work on the North Fork. Bringing together the traditions of abstraction and textiles, the show featured unstretched canvas paintings, paintings on paper, photographs, and an installation based on my artist’s book, “The Garden.” Never before exhibited paintings and key archival works chronicle a chapter of personal loss and acceptance. Encompassing both galleries of East End Arts, Riverhead, NY, the exhibition begins in the cluster of farm-house rooms of the Main Gallery progressing to the open space of the West Gallery.

My unstretched paintings reach high and wide. Stained sections of drop cloth canvas dangle telltale threads from their seams. Irregular downpours of color buckle the patched surfaces. Crisp colored-pencil lines float amongst radiant circles and stripes. Together they test the roiling flows.

I trade experimental methods between my intimate works on stitched paper and the larger canvases. Activated by color, each painting ultimately has its own improvised story. My “Sentence Structure” photographs of partially revealed hand-written journals examine the elusive process of self-reflection. At the center of the exhibition, pages of my artist’s book, “The Garden” are nailed to the wall emphatically unfurling messages of the heart.

The exhibition includes a series of gallery conversations and final performances.