Margaret Grimes’s paintings are about vastness, not just the all-encompassing kind, but also vastness at the molecular or cellular level. She paints the individual leaf and the entire screen of the forest. And although Grimes depicts trees, her work also suggests technology. She paints the hard drive, the motherboard of nature. The interlocking, crisscrossing branches and root systems could as easily be wires and cables. The patterns the roots form are not exactly grids, but they nonetheless imply matrixes because they play with our desire to find patterns and regularity in the midst of chaos. In this sense they are about the sublime, the beauty that is at the edge of our grasp, in Rilke’s sense, ‘For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.’ JENNIFER SAMET (2013)
Margaret Grimes, Red October, 2014. Oil on linen, 60 x 88 inches. Courtesy of the Artist
Margaret Grimes: Passages, February 25 to March 22, 530 West 25th Street, Fourth Floor, between 10th and 11th avenues, 646 487 4730
print