Warren Isensee |
Press Release |
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| Biography |
New Work |
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Warren Isensee’s new work revels in vivid, exuberant, unrestrained color within the context of classic, geometric abstraction. Isensee avoids the anonymous, impersonal appearance often associated with hard-edged painting, however. The interstices between the pencil lines, drawn without the use of tape, activate the surface, creating the look of something clearly generated by the hand. Isensee’s unexpected and playful juxtapositions of vibrant color create a visual intensity. Illusory pale spots throb at the intersections of black lines and colored stripes glow like neon tubes. 1 Isensee’s glowing grid, striped and concentric rectangle paintings play adroitly with conventions of Modernist abstraction and are almost hallucinogenically beautiful.2 |
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This is earnest work without a whiff of cynicism about the redemptive value of abstraction. Much of its pleasure comes from the vital flush of optimism – the sense that colors, compressed judicially one against the other and distributed wisely within a geometric environment, are all that is needed for a full and meaningful expression of emotion.3 |
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Born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1956, Isensee studied architecture at the University of Oklahoma and subsequently majored in painting and graphic design. Isensee was included in the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts and received a Purchase award. He received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 1999 and has exhibited extensively in the United States and is included in the collections of Blanton Museum, Austin, TX, the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY among others. He works in New York City where he lives with 1 Johnson, Ken. The New York Times, Jan. 20, 2006. |
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