Laurie Fendrich, Modern Times: Recent Paintings & Drawings

Louis Stern Fine Arts is pleased to present an exhibition of Laurie Fendrich’s vibrant abstract paintings, her first solo gallery show in Los Angeles. Known for her intriguing combinations of playfulness and rigor, the New York artist — a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts — merges an acute sense of the present with deep knowledge of the past. Her richly-colored, geometric works pay homage to an earlier modernism but are entirely their own, 21st century selves.

As Grace Glueck wrote in The New York Times, her painting contains “a salute to Russian Constructivism, a nod to Art Deco, a bow to 30’s American modernism, more than a dash of loony cartoony pop culture. But the combos actually work, forming crisp compositions whose bright toylike colors, suave mattings of geometric with biomorphic forms, and skilled painting give the work a decorous pizzazz.”

In Art in America’s review of Fendrich’s 2010 retrospective exhibition at Scripps College, Leah Ollman wrote: “She generates energy and rhythm in her work, through a carnivalesque approach to color, exuberant but finely tuned.”

Focusing on Fendrich’s Conté crayon drawings — a separate but consistent body of work — Mario Naves wrote in New York’s City Arts that they constitute “a droll synthesis of Utopian geometry and cartoony distortion: fractured and bulbous shapes that take on a jaunty anthropomorphism; and, not least, a meticulous attention to craft.”

Fendrich was born in Paterson, NJ, and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from Mount Holyoke College in 1970, before turning to painting. She received an MFA in painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1978. In 1985, Fendrich was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in painting. Her work has been the subject of solo gallery exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Vancouver, and Cincinnati, among other cities. She has been a visiting artist at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France; the Siena Art Institute, Italy; and in Fall 2015, the San Francisco Art Institute.

A Professor Emerita of Fine Arts at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, Fendrich has also written extensively about art and other cultural matters for The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Common Review, and the Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.