Artist: Claudia Keep
Venue: Tops Gallery, Memphis, US
Date: September 18 – November 6, 2021
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Tops Gallery
Tops Gallery is pleased announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Claudia Keep.This show will take place at both Tops’ Front street gallery and our Madison Avenue Park space.
Claudia Keep’s paintings of everyday scenes foreground the distance between an illusive objectivity and the inexactitude of human perception. Her attention to the emotional essence of her subjects paradoxically points one to a greater understanding of what is seen. The subjects are not merely made up of their component parts: shapes, colors, and textures, but they are also imbued with contingencies and carry a weight of experience.
The domestic size of these paintings reflect the every-day world depicted. Not grandiose; personal and private. The scale invites the viewer to take a closer look and highlights the intimacy involved in looking. Keep places us mere inches away from her subjects where we are asked to slow down and notice things that are routinely overlooked.
At the Madison Avenue Park space Keep will be showing a selection of her screen paintings. The insects caught in the screen windows and doors present us with a subject rarely seen in painting but offers us a familiar touchtone, that of the modernist mainstay and now ubiquitous in our current screen culture; the grid.The subjects are not only framed for us to examine, but they are literally stuck to the picture plane on imprecise grids, mapping the coordinates of their location and reinforcing each of the surfaces’ two-dimensionality.
Claudia Keep was born in 1993 in Low Moor, Virginia. Keep received a BA in Fine Arts from Bryn Mawr College in 2015. Her solo exhibitions include Night Moves at MARCH, John’s Friends at Galerie Ulysses (Vienna, Austria) and A Day in Maine at the University of Kentucky Medical Center Gallery (Lexington, Kentucky) in 2019. Keep has also exhibited with The Painting Center (New York, NY), Auxier Kline (New York, NY), Ablebaker Contemporary (Portland, ME), and Reyes Finn (Detroit).
