Jim Melchert Laura Dufort July 6 - July 30, 2023 Gallery Paule Anglim is pleased to announce an exhibition featuring recent works by JIM MELCHERT. Melchert has been at the center of the Bay Area's artistic growth and served as Visual Arts head at the NEA and Director of the American Academy at Rome. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Oakland Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley. Melchert has worked in a variety of media, including drawing, film, and ceramics. The path of his artistic development is conceptual, and his ideas led him to a unique process involving ceramic tiles: breaking them, drawing on them, reassembling them and painting the new constructions with glaze. An early Melchert piece was recently featured in the Tate Liverpool exhibition, "A Secret History of Clay, from Gauguin to Gormley". In the 1972 performance Changes, the artist and his companions dunk their heads in clay slip and are filmed waiting for it to dry, in a room that is hot at one end and cold at the other. The body itself is described in terms of the vessel: 'It encases your head so that the sounds that you hear are interior, your breathing, your heartbeat, and your nervous system. (It is surprising how vast we are inside.)' Melchert's new ceramic tile works will be wall-mounted and assembled in grids. The lines resulting from the breakages dictate compositions to the artist. Formal patterns built from groups of repeated stripes of colored glaze draw the viewer into the more intimate textural experience of alternating shiny and matt surfaces. Image above: Jim Melchert, Lunar, 2003, Porcelain tile, 17.5" x 17.5" Gallery Paule Anglim is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by LAURA DUFORT. Laura Dufort has completed new paintings that are the embodiment of a quiet rigor. Her new silvery white paintings seem the result of a purification; movement and palette distilled into quiet clarity and gestural simplicity. In these new radiant paintings made up of circles floating over a shiny ground, Dufort places more emphasis on emptiness and the experience of space. The nearly translucent circles are still, suggesting suspended motion. The floating sensation of the 'O' shapes gently balances the movement in the repeating swirls of paint. Each regulated mark of the artist�s brush is a meditative gesture. Each represents a moment in space and can be seen as both personal and cosmological. There's something about repetition that serves meditation. The body, hand and eye learn to execute the motion While attention witnesses the action� -Laura Dufort This will be the fifth exhibition for Laura Dufort at Gallery Paule Anglim. A reception for both artists will be held Thursday, July 7th from 5:30- 7:30 p.m.