Andrea Morganstern

Shelter is pleased to announce Fractalia, a solo exhibition of new paintings, drawings, and sculpture by Andrea Morganstern. 

For this body of work, the artist developed a color blocked palette of patterns that speaks to the vibration of our waking life. Working in this tight and pared down selection of color, she focuses on sequence and arrangement, creating compositions that drive the viewer toward the deeper contemplation of the materiality surrounding us. Rhythms emerge in the surface quality of the grounds she lays, where meditative planes of vibrating color lend to the kinetic insinuations of her work. These undulating arrangements imply the subatomic motion at the root of all matter; a driving beat of pulsations from color fields dotted with marching particles, rendered across a glowing spectrum. 

Morganstern seeks to both harness and depict this energy, serving as a conduit where the wavelength begins to create its own self portrait. While she has long explored this dynamic, the artist has recently developed spatial representations of her works, suspending her particles in an embryonic state utilizing a selection of colored ABS spheres. Creating ladders akin to DNA strands, we begin to see the work as diagram, attempting to teach us; attempting to demonstrate a scientific principle at work. Appearing to float within a fluid homeostasis, we again find ourselves peering into the microscope; one step closer to seeing that which she sees all around us. 

Andrea Morganstern’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions

in museums and galleries throughout the United States and internationally, including the Islip Art Museum in East Islip, NY, the Attleboro Arts Museum in Massachusetts, the George Segal Gallery at Montclair University and Bartok 1 Gallery in Budapest, Hungary. Her paintings are in several collections, including the Masterworks Museum of Art in Bermuda and the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, MO. Morganstern was born in New York City and studied at The School of Visual Arts and the New York Academy of Art. She lives and works in New York.

Andrea Morganstern’s Atomism

Modest in size, Andrea Morganstern’s paintings are grand in conception. Their very titles proclaim it: Creation, Flow, Microcosm… They want to envision how things are, or how they might be, rather than how they appear. In that sense, her art amounts to a kind of homemade philosophy—but one whose roots are ancient. Atomism arose independently in Greece and India: a way of accounting for the intuition that the world as we see it is not the ultimate reality—according to Democritus of Abdera, what we perceive is merely νόμος (nomos), which is variously translated as convention, custom, or opinion. Reality, he maintained, was only the imperceptible: atoms and void. In ancient Buddhist thought, atoms are not material substance but minimal quanta of energetic change—momentary events. 

Painting may not require a choice between these two atomisms. A painted dot is a minute bit of matter but also, as color, a kind of vibration, a trace of energy. In Morganstern’s work these chromatic atoms gather, disperse, form worlds and abolish them, evoke all the sensations that Democritus attributed to nomos—heat and cold, sweet and bitter, and of course color itself in all its intensities and relations—while suggesting their own transitory and intangible nature. And what about the monochromatic grounds on which these atoms appear? Do they represent the void? I think not. In this, she is closer to India than to Greece: The variegated facture of the nebulous grounds reminds us that, if we could only look more closely, these too are accumulations of tiny particles—neither solid nor void but energetic clouds of color.

—Barry Schwabsky