Mary Ellen Bartley: Return to Summer Reading

The Drawing Room is pleased to present "Mary Ellen Bartley | Return to Summer Reading," an exhibition on view by appointment in East Hampton from June 10 through July 6, 2020. An illustrated online catalog is accessible on the gallery’s website: www.drawingroom-gallery.com.

In 2019, Bartley came upon bins of second hand midcentury paperbacks at The Strand Bookstore in New York City. Captivated by the lush color of their dyed pages, she began amassing hundreds of mass-market pulp books to create stacked formal arrangements in her studio. Return to Summer Reading presents twelve tranquil still lifes of tightly composed clusters of paperbacks. Using the camera to explore both painterly and sculptural elements, Bartley unifies the sensuous qualities of her subjects through her mastery of natural light effects.

Without visible clues to the titles or authors, the eyelevel, tabletop stacks of paperbacks evoke striped architectural monuments. Scale is a mystery in the chunky novels sandwiched between thin volumes positioned for rhythm, contour and hue. Crisp shadows of the rag paper edges dissolve into towers of incised, faded color. Through her engagement with the found palette of lime, tangerine, gold, magenta and raspberry pulp, Bartley casts her own private history upon the stacks, transforming books into evocative abstract structures. Bright and muted bands of color offer a slow meditation on abstraction and the considered and idiosyncratic arrangements individuals make with their own books.

 
See below for full press release and selected works.