New Work
Ann Schaumburger

GALLERY I

April 20 – May 19, 2024

Opening reception: Saturday, April 20, from 6–8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce New Work, an exhibition of recent Flashe on panel paintings by New York Member Ann Schaumburger that extends the artist’s decades-long investigation into color.

For over fifty years, Schaumburger has used the house as a basic structure—a scaffold—for exploring how colors interact with one another. Schaumburger builds her houses with blocks of four pigments, using stencil brushes and tape to fill each house with modular forms. Influenced by the theories of Josef Albers, Schaumburger’s approach to color is meticulous yet playful. Different colors dazzle and dance when placed in proximity, creating a sense of surprise. 

The paintings in this new body of work depart from Schaumburger’s earlier explorations in one key detail: the houses are now mounted on wheels. This choice was inspired by Schaumburger’s reading of the biography of Henry David Thoreau, whose family had attached wheels to their domicile, allowing them to transport the house across different sites in Concord, Massachusetts. “The idea of taking a solid house, attached to the ground, and letting it roll away,” Schaumburger says, “seems both comical and deeply suggestive of our times.”

Schaumburger has described her color choices as an attempt to “solve an aesthetic problem.” Yet the work is not entirely abstract. Titles like Forest House Under Summer Sky and Moonscape Moving House gesture toward the fact that certain color relationships become evocative of different seasons, places, and times of day. All of the paintings in the exhibition feature a crescent or small globe in the upper left or right quadrant. Sometimes, this globe is rendered in metallic gold or bronze, recalling the sun. Other times, it is a lunar silver. The round shape of the globe mirrors the house’s circular wheels. Just as the earth rotates around the sun, the wheels rotate around their own axles, allowing the house to move.

The wheeled house becomes a spirited metaphor for Schaumburger’s practice. Dynamic rather than stationary, it embodies the liveliness and energy of Schaumburger’s color choices, as well as the open-ended nature of her process.

Ann Schaumburger has shown extensively in New York City and internationally. Her work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at the New York Public Library; The Museum of American Illustration, New York, NY; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, TX; Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France; PS1 in Long Island City, NY; The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; and Hillwood Art Museum, Brookville, NY. Schaumburger has completed several public commissions, most notably Urban Oasis, seventeen mosaic friezes permanently installed at the Fifth Avenue/59th Street subway station for the New York City MTA Arts and Design Program. She has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Centre d’Art i Natura in Spain, Brisons Veor in England, and the Ossabaw Island Project, Savannah, Georgia. www.annschaumburger.com

View the Press Release here.

View Ann Schaumburger’s page here.

Public Program:

Meet the Artist: Ann Schaumburger

Saturday, April 27, from 3–6pm

Saturday, May 4, from 3–6pm

Saturday, May 11, from 3–6pm

Sunday, May 19, from 3–6pm

A.I.R. Gallery

Photography: Matthew Sherman