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:: By Brooke E. O’Neill, AM’04
:: Photo courtesy Zg Gallery
Peer Review ::
On Exhibit
The color of chaos
“I record, reorder, react to that which I cannot avoid, the order and disorder of living,” explains artist Martina Nehrling, MFA’01. A solo exhibit at Chicago’s Zg Gallery through July 8 echoes this “cacophony of experience” with color splashes and spatial experimentation. Nehrling confesses occasional doubt about art’s value in today’s turbulent world and reflects “the weight of daily life, its beauty and its horror” via layered and tangled brush strokes. “I use simple brush strokes to be direct,” she says, “but color because it is effusive and unavoidable.” In her painting Tangle, staccato brushstrokes merge in a knotted pattern where “chatter hovers on the edge of chaos.” Bright shades have always drawn her, but it was only during her graduate studies that Nehrling “quit suppressing my impulse to use abundant, unapologetic color.”
