Marsha Cottrell

Opening reception: Thursday 15 September 2016, 6 – 8 pm

Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to present Marsha Cottrell’s first exhibition with the gallery.  This will be the artist’s first solo presentation on the West Coast. Cottrell utilizes the tool of the laser printer as one would a paint brush, registering mathematically defined lines and shapes grabbed from the software’s tool palette onto handmade paper in multiple passes of carbon-based toner. Each work is an improvisation that develops slowly and gradually on the page, or an instantaneously generated translation of a carefully controlled file, interpreted according to the printer’s unpredictability when “misused.”

AMFAs exhibition presents three bodies of work within Cottrell’s oeuvre–Spectral Sun and related works, Apertures, and grid-based compositions that expand on the artist’s Interior series. Seamlessly integrating digital technology and the handmade into a new language of abstraction, each body of work explores imagery in seemingly infinite variation, employing error, accident and repetition. For Cottrell, the quotidian office computer and software is an analytical and resistant framework from which she considers human interiority, consciousness, and the corporeal.

Cottrell is a recipient of the 2013 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Biennial Award; the 2007 Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Fellowship Grant in Drawing; and the 2001 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Fellowship.  Selected public collections include The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, NY; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA.