Exhibition Opening: Lucy Maki, Shape Shift

Lucy Maki’s work ranges in scale from large mixed media shaped canvases to small constructions. Investigations of color, materiality, pattern, and space are central to the work’s visual appeal. Architectural thought organizes the inside/outside pictorial space, while gestures of modernist painting and design define the surface.

Materials – wood, aluminum plate, collage, canvas and various acrylic media, as well as an undetermined process, factor in and are essential to the schematic’s of the painting.

Works become puzzles to be interpreted as the painting progresses and is completed. By noticing, feeling, the interactions between shape, color, line, brushwork, texture, and ordered sequence mysteriously emerges that makes the paintings structure coherent. Abstraction, as geometric imagery, is used to convey thoughts regarding processes of illusion and perception. Behind the facade of a strong visual appeal, which is often associated with the decorative, there may emerge (or may not) questions, comments, and word plays regarding how one sees and interprets knowledge, reality, existence…seriously, or with fun.

Lucy Maki lives and works in Albuquerque NM. Her paintings are in the NM Museum of Art, Santa Fe, The Albuquerque Museum of Art and History and the University of NM Fine Arts Museum as well as in distinguished private collections. She will be exhibiting a new solo show, “Shape Shift” this March at EXHIBIT208 in Albuquerque. In 2022 she participated in Southwest Contemporary’s “12 New Mexico Artists to Know Now” at Pie Projects” Santa Fe. She earned an MFA with distinction from the University of New Mexico.