Reception: Friday, January 12, 6–8pm, Grunwald Gallery
Exhibition: January 12–March 2, 2024
Gallery hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 12–4pm. Closed Sunday and Monday.
Tim Kennedy Artist Talk: February 19, 5pm in Fine Arts 102
Eve Mansdorf Artist Talk: February 21, 5pm in Fine Arts 102
The Grunwald Gallery opens its 2024 season Friday, January 12 with “Shared Spaces,” an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Eve Mansdorf and Tim Kennedy, long-standing members of the studio art faculty in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University in Bloomington. Having taught at IU for a combined total of 52 years, the pair have made significant contributions to the field of contemporary, observational painting and the national reputation of Eskenazi’s painting area, and mentored thousands of emerging artists. “Shared Spaces” opens with a reception Friday, January 12 from 6-8 p.m. at the Grunwald Gallery of Art, 1201 E. 7th St. in Bloomington, and remains on view through March 2. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12-4 p.m. There will be an artist talk featuring Tim Kennedy on February 19 at 5pm in Fine Arts 102. There will be an artist talk featuring Eve Mansdorf on February 21 at 5pm in Fine Arts 102.
“Shared Spaces” offers an unusual opportunity to explore common ground and divergences between artists whose creative and personal lives have been closely interwoven for three decades. The exhibition will showcase drawings and paintings by both artists, comprising still-life, landscape, and interior subjects, with and without figural elements, based on direct observation. Bloomington’s bungalows and Victorian houses, silver maple trees, a local pool, and state parks have been sources for many of both artists’ paintings.
Mansdorf and Kennedy, who are married, earned MFAs within a few years of one another at Brooklyn College, where their respective studies with artists such as Lennart Anderson and Lois Dodd resulted in shared artistic sensibilities. Mansdorf has been on the faculty of the Eskenazi School since 1996, and Kennedy, since 2000.
The exhibition title also points to the seamlessness between the artists’ lived experience and their creative realm. A commitment to “painting from life” has often blurred the boundary between art and life so that what is lived is often what is painted in the artists’ work. Several of the houses that figure in both artists’ paintings started out as studio spaces and later became the couple’s home. Lately, both artists have sought out public locations farther afield by reconstructing and synthesizing studies done onsite into studio paintings. A continual tension in these works emerges in balancing the lure of perceptual reality with the desire for invention.
“Although we both paint recognizable subjects drawn from life, it would be too simple to categorize and describe the work by subject or image,” the painters say. “Painting is a process, and the vitality of that process is what gives both the activity and the object meaning. The painting, the paint and incremental perception tell us what is needed as opposed to simply being submitted to our wills. It is a process of growth and accretion rather than one of fiat or manufacture.”
