Lehmann Maupin is pleased to announce a one-person exhibition by Bonnie Collura entitled "In the Gutter." This show marks Collura's first show at Lehmann Maupin and it will consist of Collura's signature works on paper as well as her amalgamated sculptures of plaster, foam, paper, putty and paint.
Bonnie Collura studied sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University and then completed her MFA at Yale University before moving to Brooklyn. Since beginning to exhibit four years ago, her work has been included in the "Pop Surrealism" exhibition at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut, the "Concentrations" series at the Dallas Museum of Art, as well as the "Spectacular Optical" exhibition at Thread Waxing Space and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami. Jan Hoet selected her for two commissions in Germany: one for the Kunstwegen outdoor sculpture center in Nordhorn in 1999 and the other for Hannmünden in 1998. Last year, Collura was presented with the Emerging Artist Award by the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art. This spring she will participate in the "Dialogue" series curated by Douglas Fogle at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis.
The word gutter has a number of meanings, including the space between each cell of an animated cartoon and the gully space at the inside edge of a printed text. It is in these spaces that Collura's imagery is born. Systems of connected characters are drawn into the gutter from mainstream popular culture, mythology and folklore to meet, intermingle, and morph. In this realm, iconic figures such as Snow White, Persephone, Bernini's St. Ludovica and Dorothy Gale from the Wizard of Oz can all relate. Each work in Collura's fantastic universe is an evolving assemblage of transplanted bodies and trademarks.
Much like a pop-up book, the exhibition moves from the flat to the three-dimensional. The first room of the exhibition is predominantly contoured wall drawings in black, white and the three colors used in dot matrix color printing: yellow, magenta, and cyan. In the main gallery, Collura's sculptural hybrids are installed from the walls, the ceiling and the floor alongside a number of her dynamic drawings. Finally, the third room becomes home to the sculpture "Snowman," a figure that seamlessly combines Collura's varied references. In this way, the gallery space itself becomes a gutter or in-between place where characters become elastic and play out their own struggles and transformations.