Halsey Mckay Gallery is pleased to present Various Positions, our first solo exhibition with Janis Provisor. Provisor’s multi media paintings on linen slip and slide from suggested imagery into pure abstraction. Now in her seventies she credits this phase of life for helping develop a confident economy of mark making and application of paint. An ethereal nature to her pictures is furthered by her use of watercolor and water-based oil, whose physical properties pool, crackle, divide and reconnect like sinewy memories on the surface of her paintings. Her compositions balance formal concerns with pictorial evocation and recollections just out of reach. Loose geometry can as much suggest a mountain or a mustache, while viscous washes of deckled alizarin or cobalt pigment may suggest a tongue, cheekily sticking out, or the sea. There is a precariousness to the paintings, as if the delicate strokes are just grasping on to the boundaries of the rectangle. She considers it all autobiographical as she grapples with her own emotions, desires, frustrations – the truths of life and of creating paintings.
Janis Provisor was born in Brooklyn, NY and currently resides in Litchfield, CT. She received her Masters Degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in California. Solo exhibitions include Barbara Toll, NY; Dorothy Golden Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; Holly Solomon Gallery, NY; Reed College, Portland, OR; University of California Berkeley, CA; New Orleans Museum of Art, LA. Group exhibitions include Crown Point Press, SF, CA; New Museum, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Kaoshing Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; Aspen Art Museum, CO; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; MoMA PS1, NY; Brooklyn, Museum, NY; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Provisor’s work is held in the permanent collections of Ludwig Museum, Aachen, Germany; University Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; Oakland Art Museum, CA; Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY; Yale Gallery of Art, CT; National Gallery, Washington DC; Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, CA; Mumok-Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna, Austria and the RISD Museum, RI, among many others.
