April 7th-May 7th, 2011

Victoria Munroe Fine Art is pleased to present for the first time new paintings and collages by Carol Gove, from Temple, New Hampshire. Previously represented by the Judi Rotenberg Gallery, this is her first exhibition at VMFA. Gove's unique mixed media paintings with collage offer a fresh, contemporary approach to a process branded by Braque and Picasso in Paris in 1912 and reinvented in the Dadaist and Constructivist collages of the 1920s. German artist Kurt Schwitters brought commonplace materials into the picture plane later to be revisited by Rauschenberg in his combine paintings of assemblage in the 1960s. Carol Gove's paintings mine the history of the language of pasted papers in a context of abstract painting. Her refined and highly personal process offers a new and tender voice in the intriguing exploration of flatness and illusion, and the revelatory power of painting.

The group of ten small paper collages in the installation with the mixed media collage paintings present Gove's pure collage sensibility. In them, we explore a packed, abstract space of torn, cut and overlapped printed evidence in formal compositions of colored papers. Each paper collage is like a mosaic constructed on an intimate scale of 6 x 6 inch squares. Ripped with care from its source, each fragment of color carries with it faded evocations of place near or far, defined by edges offering a multiplicity of readings. Gove's collages are radiant jewels of physical textures and foreign colors.

In her mixed media paintings, Gove draws from landscape, portraiture, and abstract expressionism, striking an elegant balance of the painterly gesture and the pasted fragment in each square composition of 24 or 36 inches. Her collection of papers includes old, handwritten letters in brown ink on blue stationery, sheet music and sewing patterns, all of which bring a subliminal text to her paintings' already rich surface. Mindful of the charged visual impact of printed or scripted text, Gove submerges the collage elements in layers of thin washes of paint where they recede or surface as if in a pigmented tide of irrepressible memories. This tension and play between the graphic history of the ephemera glued between lush paint strokes creates a fragile realm structured by the painting’Äôs own history of its making. The lively interaction of brushed layers of sheer color against the hard edges of torn or cut diagrams or newspaper clippings beckons us into a space we almost feel we know.

In A New Shelter, Gove paints a precisely syncopated patchwork of opacities in a palette of celadon, Matisse blue, and aged papers under lit by an Italian ochre light. The structure of lines and drips against the painterly textures and visual incident is rich. In Determined, a cacophony of collaged papers hold an imaginary horizon suggesting a happening urban stretch. Large sheets of printed text lift the distant views we imagine giving a lively push and pull to the surface. Patches of forest green, pumpkin and black secure the architecture of the space allowing the flotsam and jetsam paper scraps, drips and abraded paint to fly about.

Carol Gove's paintings and collages remind us of fleeting reflections and our own sea of memories.