ALLISON GILDERSLEEVE BIOGRAPHY

Allison Gildersleeve produces painterly renderings of dense forests and other natural scenes found on the edge of cultivated or domesticated spaces. Thick layers of colorful paint squeezed directly from a tube and moved around with a palette knife intentionally evoke the styles and methods of Abstract Expressionism. Considering her work “experiential landscapes,” Gildersleeve aims for viewers to recognize the subject, only to have it dissolve before their eyes into a vocabulary of abstract shapes and lines, and then reappear. Her affinity for nature stems from time spent in the woods near her New England home as a child, photographs of which form the basis for her compositions. “When I paint these woods, I want it to feel as if all the stories that took place there are unfolding simultaneously,” she says. American, b. 1970, based in Brooklyn, New York