Lyons Wier • Ortt Gallery, New York is pleased to announce “Forces”, Mary Henderson’s second New York solo exhibition at Lyons Wier • Ortt Gallery on view from October 10th – November 8th, 2008.

Mary Henderson’s latest exhibition, “Forces”, continues the artist’s hyper-real painting style that documents a particular American subculture or experience. In her previous exhibition, “Right Clique”, Ms. Henderson gathered inspiration from photo-sharing websites that celebrated rite-of-passage images of the elite prep-school experience. As a participant in this world, she was able to distill her commentary to a moment of realization within the context of her subjects, creating images that were captivating yet confounding.

With “Forces”, Henderson continues to draw from personal experience through her brother, a Commander in the U.S. Navy, who served in Iraq from February to August 2007. During his deployment, she sought information about her brother by visiting public web portals where service members posted information and images about the war as well as their day-to-day activities.

During this time, Henderson became fascinated with images that depicted soldiers in uniform but in non-combat settings. She wanted to zero in on moments of ‘down time’, moments that seemed suffused with an odd combination of boredom, bravado, and anxiety. Her hope while rendering these images as paintings was to sharpen the complexities of their emotional tone, to capture their poignancy, and create something iconic and remote.

Henderson’s process remains largely the same: she re-crops and refocuses images sourced from photo-sharing websites and then paints from the altered digital image. Through this transformative act of painting, the image is distilled and changed into something more archetypal: it ceases to be simply about a particular person or captured fleeting moment, and becomes instead something more public, permanent, and aesthetically pertinent.

The artist cites inspiration from neoclassical artists such as Ingres and David, specifically from works depicting events and personalities of the French Revolutionary and early Napoleonic period. These painters elevated the status of events occurring around them as ‘world history’ – a task accomplished by reaching back to the visual tropes of Greco-Roman antiquity. The result was painting that was simultaneously about and beyond their historical moment.

Mary Henderson’s work, in focusing on our own wars of ‘idealism’, attempts something similar: to render a contemporary experience as history by taking images from their original digital context and re-presenting them in a medium associated with the past -- painting. By referencing some of the visual language of French neoclassicism, particularly compressed palettes and strongly defined linear forms, Henderson evokes some of the luster and stillness that gave those images their timeless quality. The effect is that her paintings feel very contemporary in their vagueness.

However, her ultimate goal in making contemporary history painting differs from those of artists like David. Whereas David was interested in imbuing the famous figures of his age with historical grandiosity, Henderson’s subjects appear to be more modest and ambivalent. She focuses on ordinary people who finds themselves caught up in our current historical moment (the Iraq war), and on their more inward and profound experiences.

Henderson wants her work to feel like historical portraiture and yet appear as candid snapshots, more reflective of the way we experience history in the digital age, where the distinction between private and public experience has become increasingly blurred. Her paintings are neither a celebration nor a condemnation of their subjects. Rather, they are an attempt to explore a particular way of seeing and experiencing such a significant historical event and, in doing so, finding the monumental in the mundane.

Mary Henderson received her BA in Fine Arts in 1995 from Amherst College in Amherst, MA, and her MFA in Painting in 2001 from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, where she currently lives and works.

MARY HENDERSON EDUCATION:

2001 MFA, Painting, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 1997 Post-Baccalaureate, Studio Art, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 1995 AB cum laude, Fine Arts, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 1994 Studio Art Centers International, Florence, Italy

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS:

2008
Solo Exhibition, (Lyons Wier/Ortt Gallery) October, New York City
PULSE New York (Lyons Wier/Ortt Gallery), New York, NY

2007
Year '07 (Lyons Wier/Ortt Gallery) October, London, England
Preview Berlin (Lyons Wier/Ortt Gallery), Berlin, Germany
Farewell 511, Lyons Wier/Ortt, New York, NY
SWAB (Lyons Wier/Ortt Gallery), Barcelona, Spain
PULSE New York (Lyons Wier/Ortt Gallery), New York, NY

2006
Right Clique, Lyons Wier/Ortt Contemporary, Solo Show, New York, NY
Scope London (Lyons Wier/Ortt Gallery), London, England
Art212 (Lyons Wier/Ortt Gallery), New York, NY
PULSE New York (Lyonswier Gallery), New York, NY
Art LA (Lyonswier Gallery), Los Angeles, CA

2005
Recollection: Mary Henderson and Susan Slattery, Painted Bride Art Center, Philadelphia, PA
Reality Show, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Group Show, Larchmont, NY
Operation RAW, Ice Box Project Space, Group Show, Philadelphia, PA
Summer Show ’05, Zg Gallery, Group Show, Chicago, IL

2004
Thrills, Zg Gallery, Solo Show, Chicago, IL

2003
Album, Zg Gallery, Solo Show, Chicago, IL
As Small as Possible, Zg Gallery, Group Show, Chicago, IL
Compendium, Zg Gallery, Group Show, Chicago, IL
really, gescheidle, Group Show, Chicago, IL
Momenta Art Benefit 2003, Momenta Art, Brooklyn, NY and White Columns, New York, NY

2002
Less Than One, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Group Show, Larchmont, NY
12”x12”, Zg Gallery, Group Show, Chicago, IL
Night of 1000 Drawings, Artists Space, Group Show, New York, NY
AAF Contemporary, New York, NY

2001
Talking Heads, Kenise Barnes Fine Art, Larchmont, NY
The Future is Now, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE
New Talent, Gross-McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
MFA Thesis Exhibition, Horton Gallery, Philadelphia, PA

2000
GSFA Award Winners’ Show, Meyerson Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Small Print Show, Fox Gallery, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA



Awards/Residencies
2005
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts SOS Grant, Visual Arts - Painting

2004
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, Visual Arts - Painting Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

2003
Jentel Artist Residency, Banner, WY

2000
Neil Welliver Award, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

2001
Chairman’s Scholarship, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA



COLLECTIONS:
Burger Collection, Switzerland
Sender Collection, New York
West Collection, Oaks PA

BIBLIOGRAPHY:
2007 Michael Amy, "Right Clique", Art in America
2006 Harpers Magazine, December 2006, p.24 (image reproduction)
2004 Lori Hill, “First Friday Focus,” Philadelphia City Paper, March 31-April 6,
2005, p.26. Fred Camper, “Now Showing,” Chicago Reader, December 24, 2004, sec. 2, p. 21.
Carrie Sandler, “Twirling Pink Teacups,” UR Chicago, November 18 - December 15, 2004,p. 21
Celeste Starita, “This Week in the Arts,” The Weekly Press, Philadelphia, April 21, 2004
Cover image, XConnect: Writers of the Information Age, Vol. 6,

2003 Elio Iannaci, “For Art’s Sake,” UR Chicago Magazine, June 12 - July 16, 2003, p.19
Lisa Stein “What you see isn’t what you get: ‘Really’,” Chicago Tribune, May 16.

2002 Julie Farstad and Kristen Brooke Schleifer, “Lipservice: Our Short List for Fall 2002,” Mouth to Mouth, Fall 2002, Vol. 1, No. 2, p. 39.

2001 New American Paintings: Open Studios Press, Boston, MA, Fall 2001, pp.38-41.
Roberta Fallon, “Sketches: Fresh Palette,” Philadelphia Weekly, July 1, 2001, p. 68.