Buster Levi Gallery is pleased to present Paintings: A Matter of Fact by Ursula Schneider at 121 Main Street in Cold Spring, New York. The exhibition will run from April 7 through April 30, 2017.  The opening for the show will be on Friday April 7, 2017 from 6-8pm.

The selection of works in this show will include drawings and paintings that derive from three series. Though different, each shares similarities in the way that Schneider uses paint to explore her surroundings and nature in general. 

The largest painting in the show is titled Aster and Asteroids. It is one of her Hudson River paintings, a series that Schneider has been working on for over ten years. The paintings are based on views of the river that can be seen from her window looking east towards Westchester. In this painting, Schneider combines observed elements such as the starry sky and reflections in the water and exaggerates their appearance through color intensity and choice. Furthermore, she adds fantastical elements such as the rocks floating in the sky. Schneider comments on the work; “The idea behind Aster and Asteroids is that it contrasts the celebratory image in another painting titled Fireworks by its focus on the big dark rocks that move through the universe, the asteroids, which suggests concern for the uncertainty over the Hudson River”.

“The Gunnera paintings are inspired by the plant of the same name, which I discovered in Stonecrop Gardens, Cold Spring. It is a tropical plant from the Rhubarb family with gigantic leaves. The structure and the changing forms of leaves as they mature is what inspired me; the pure power of growing and dying”. As in almost all of Schneider’s paintings, she uses abstracted flat shapes of sometimes local and but often invented color to define forms that are completely convincing. This is particularly evident in a blue dominated painting where light and dark values of blue define dimension in some of the leaves wherein others, Schneider uses reds to define the shadows and in some areas the color is completely un-modulated. Her freedom of color allows Schneider to convey various states of the plant whether seasonal or cyclical.

Schneider’s involvement with apple trees is a combination of memory, an interest in the effects of season or weather along with the naturally expressive gestures in the growth of the branches. Schneider states;  “I grew up seeing old apple trees, I love the movement in their gestures, grown and standing still, literally, for a very long time.” With less concern for form than gestural potential her focus is on the variety of the directions and shapes that are present in the branches of individual trees. 

Ursula Schneider was born in Switzerland and moved to the United States in 1968. In 1972, she graduated with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Schneider was represented be the Braunstein Gallery in San Francisco from 1974-2011 and was also a member of A.I.R. Gallery in New York City from 1996-2014. She was a member of the visual art faculty at Sarah Lawrence College from 1987-2014. Schneider is a painter and printmaker and makes woodcuts. Her work can be seen on ursulaschneider.com

Selected one-person shows include: Quer Raum fur Kunst und Kultur and the Kunstmuseum in Bern Switzerland; Febicus Switzerland; Braunstein Gallery, San Francisco California and the Rockland Center for the Arts, West Nyack, NY.
Selected group shows include: Museum of Fine Arts, Fort Worth, Texas (Biennial Exhibition); Whitney Museum, NY; San Francisco Museum, CA and the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, CA.

Schneider lives and works in Rockland County.

Buster Levi Gallery is open Friday through Sunday from 12-6 pm. 
For more information: busterlevigallery.com