studio GRETCHEN WAGNER

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Kitchen Sink Sketchbooks, 2024

embroidered sketchbooks made from GF Smith Colorplan remnants and Strathmore drawing paper (12 sheets)

5 x 7 inches

Note: You cannot select specific color combinations. Sketchbooks are selected at random and colors are limited based on availability.
 

DE NOVO

Spalding Nix Fine Art

Opening Reception
Friday, 22 MAR, 6-8 PM
Saturday, 23 MAR 12-4 PM

Browse and purchase works from the exhibition HERE.

The Color Interaction IV series challenges our ability to focus and perceive a single color independently. These paintings represent my fourth iteration of works inspired by Josef Albers’ exercises studying the interaction of color and Anni Albers’ textiles. The works mimic their combined attention to integrated craft, design, and art in both theory and application.

The mixed-media paintings are more closely related to printmaking than painting in their systematic approach to independent layers of color application. To depict multiple color relationships at the same time, each painted, airbrushed, or embroidered layer creates new shapes and proportions within the composition. As these shapes overlap with one another the interactions become increasingly complex. Each painting utilizes the same composition in different color palettes to better study their similarities and differences. The multiplicity and slight variations imparted by my hand imitate my printmaking practice.

The first layers are defined by fifteen concentric watercolor washes that increase in value and saturation. The softened corners and translucent edges appear out of focus in contrast with the hard edge of the next layer, a vertical accent airbrushed in concentrated watercolor. The final layer is a network of 7,650 glass beads, designed to create an illusion of simulated transparency, similar to the translucency experienced in a loosely woven textile. In combination, each layer challenges our eye’s ability to specify any one color relationship or identity when so many variables are changing simultaneously.

https://spaldingnixfineart.com/show/spalding-nix-fine-art-de-novo



PROOF

McEachern Art Center
Opening Reception, August 4, 7 PM

PROOF is an archive documenting Gretchen Wagner’s ongoing research, process, and exploration of color as both form and content. 

The monoprints in the show address the contemporary commercialization of color and craft synthesized through printmaking and embroidery. Each varied edition is designed to manipulate the material attributes of color and demonstrate the limitations in understanding color identity. These experiments are calculated to adjust hue, saturation, and value within the confines of a specific form that evolves throughout the exhibition.

Motivated by her fascination with the inability to fully comprehend color, she utilizes the language of color to bridge theory and application; art and design; hand and machine. In attempting to study absolute color, Wagner observes the historical and contemporary distinctions of reproducible, immediate, mass-produced, situational, and paradoxical color.

https://www.macmacon.com/





ABSOLUTE COLOR

Painting M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition
Savannah College of Art and Design

SCAD Studio
Opening Reception, May 20, 4-7 PM




Graphic Palindrome (Green), 2023
Graphic Palindrome (Blue), 2023

Graphic Palindrome (Violet), 2023

embroidered monoprint on paper, braided nylon

18 x 24 inches

Defined by complement and temperature contrast.

studio GRETCHEN WAGNER 2023