Exhibition
Juanita Mcneely. Moving Through
8 Sep 2023 – 14 Oct 2023
Regular hours
- Friday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Sunday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 18:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 18:00
Address
- 5015 Melrose Ave
- Los Angeles
California - CA 90038
- United States
About
James Fuentes is pleased to present Juanita McNeely: Moving Through, an exhibition of three large-scale, multi-panel paintings from 1975, 1976, and 1977. This presentation marks McNeely's debut solo exhibition in Los Angeles, following the gallery’s first exhibition of her work in New York in 2020, which featured her thirteen-panel piece, Triskaidekaptych (1986), and nine-panel Is It Real? Yes, It Is! (1969), now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The three works on view, comprising 23 panels in total, portray bodies acrobatically suspended in ambient space—unconstrained by gravity in the atmosphere of her canvas. McNeely first witnessed multi-panel paintings in the work of Max Beckman, who she studied under at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts at Washington University. Hung low to the ground and lining her studio, this format permitted a flow state without directive for where movement should begin or end—through which McNeely’s images could ultimately come to contain multiple dimensions of reality.
As writer Sharyn Finnegan observes: “Juanita’s color is the seductress for a painting that might be difficult to look at. Her earliest work is her darkest in terms of value and not long after she would burst out as a natural colorist, realizing that it makes the work thrum with life, drawing the viewer in.” Seeming to pinpoint this graduation from the more intense contrasts in shadow and hue of her earliest works, Moving Through (1975) overflows with vibrance across its nine canvases, emptying into lighter space toward its final third. Successively, From the Black Space I (1976) and From the Black Space II (1977) spring entirely into monochromatic negative space, siphoning shades of bloody red and shadows filled in green and purple. And so, although ambitious in scale, McNeely’s canvases are lithe, employing turpentine and poppy-seed oil to keep the painting’s surface lean, fresh, and in equilibrium with their weighty content. These compositions express an aspiration to discover a means, regardless of ailment or injury, to be physically, mentally, and energetically present.