DIANA COPPERWHITE
We are pleased to announce Diana Copperwhite’s first US solo show in collaboration with Kevin Kavanagh Gallery, Dublin. This follows on from her succesful solo presentation at VOLTA NY earlier this year, and her residency at the Josef Albers Foundation in December 2012.
“Whose afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue” asked Barnett Newman in the sixties amid the era’s monikers of post-painterly abstraction and colour field painting. His answer, and indeed the answers of his compatriots at the time, seem to us now as stately as they are staid. They sit comfortably into the art historical narrative -the progressive imperative of Modernism. The paintings of Diana Copperwhite deliver us back into the maelstrom of colour resurrecting the fear that such charged tints and hues can conjure. Copperwhite’s colours misbehave, taunting and mocking our narrow appreciation of their emotional potential”.
-Patrick T. Murphy, Director of Royal Hibernian Academy Dublin.
Former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Art, at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Diana Copperwhite constantly mentions a musical logic and a sense of musical notation and tonality as she describes the act of painting. But, on the other hand, she insists that she does not pre-structure, that she allows one colour to suggest another, that the element of gesture and chance is essential as is the flash of insight and the swift ability then to structure it, to carry it out.” - Colm Tóibín
Diana Copperwhite (b. 1969, Ireland) lives and works in Dublin. In 2012 she was a resident artist at the Josef Albers Foundation Connecticut, USA. She was a finalist in the Guasch Coranty Fundacio Painting Prize, Centre Cultural Metropolita Tecia Sala, Barcelona (2008) and was winner of the AIB Art Prize (2007). Her work is in public collections including: Irish Museum of Modern Art, Arts Council of Ireland, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Office of Public Works, Contemporary Irish Art Society, Mariehamn Stadbiblioteque, International Red Cross Netherlands, and private collections in the USA, Australia and Europe.
Recent shows include; Painting Now, Ron Mandos,Amsterdam (2012), Into the Light:The Arts Council of Ireland, Crawford Gallery, Cork (2012); Diana Cooperwhite, Anna Bjerger and Oliver Comerford, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2012); Making Familiar, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2012); The Mind was Dreaming, the world was its Dream, Diana Copperwhite, Michael Kalmbach & Hiraki Sawa, Solstice Art Centre, Navan (2012); An Island from the day before, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2011); The Fold, Visual Centre for Contemporary Art, Carlow (2011); Collecting the New: Recent Acquisitions to the IMMA Collection, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2010); and eclipse of a title, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris (2009).
