George Lawson Gallery
VOLTA NY 2016

George Lawson Gallery will present a solo exhibition of six new paintings by Justine Frischmann at VOLTA NY 2016 (Booth B12), March 2-6, 2016.

A British expatriate now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Frischmann gained prominence in the 1990s with her much-heralded band Elastica. After performing for ten years, Frischmann left the music world to enroll in the Buddhist-inspired Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and emerged with a disciplined painting practice.

Frischmann straddles quite polarized worlds with the light she explores, having traversed the spotlight, the urban glare of media scrutiny, to the coastal light of the North Bay’s fog-mitigated ambience. Through the mix of oil paint, acrylic spray enamel, and repurposed photography, she balances urban and natural inferences, and captures an aura somewhere between limelight and inner light in the process.

Frischmann juxtaposes gesture and architecture, mass tone and translucence, improvisation and a considered physicality, all in the service of an art of threshold states. Rather than simply stacking the three media she employs, she shuffles them, with the fluorescent spray enamel acting as an arbitrator between the origami folds of her photo-based imagery and a fatty layer of high-valued oil paint. In the energy and immediacy of her gesture she achieves visual equivalencies for the punk ethic of London of the ‘90s, but she captures more than a simple equivalent of the tropes of an alternative social scene. The deep memory of painting as a medium pushes her work past fashion into the realm of what is perennial in the human condition, and mirror such basic building blocks as vulnerability and adaptation, loss and recovery, growth and discovery.

Painting and the life of a painter seem to accommodate the scope of Frischmann’s ambition more readily than the music scene she left behind, not only in sheer expression, but in her reach for an organizing principle, a position taken both in and out of the light, in response to things as they are, readily shifting as they do from brightness to shadow and back again.

About Justine Frischmann
Justine Frischmann was born in London, England in 1969 and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 1989, she received a BSc from the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. In 1992, she founded Elastica, a well-known British rock band and performed for 10 years. In 2005, she attended Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Frischmann has been included in numerous exhibitions including: Justine Frischmann, George Lawson Gallery, San Francisco, CA, Summer Invitational, Life on Mars Gallery, NY, NutureArt, Bernaducci Meisel Gallery, NY, The Battle of Faith and Doubt, Unspeakable Projects, San Francisco, CA, What I Like About You, Parallel Art Space, Brooklyn, NY, and Emerging Artists of the Bay, Marin MOCA, CA. In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Marmite Prize for Painting.