Anoka Faruqee: Future Perfect

Koenig & Clinton is pleased to announce Future Perfect, Anoka Faruqee’s first solo exhibition with the Gallery. Recent works from the artist’s ongoing series of Moiré Paintings foreground the début of two new series: the Circle Paintings and the Wave Paintings. By triangulating all three bodies of work Faruqee galvanizes her systematic experimentation with color, perception, and the limits of technological precision. Her simultaneous shift towards larger-scale canvases intensifies the somatic experience of varying retinal patterns.

Faruqee manually conjures the generative principle of interference, as expressed in wave formations, magnetic fields, and computer screens, by employing a wide range of customized trowels. Layer by layer, the artist rakes one selected paint color over the canvas and then later sands the dry surface to erase all resulting grooves and ridges before raking the next set of overlapping lines. Each painting offers evidence of a physical act suspended in the strata of pattern, capturing a momentary glitch that might otherwise pass undetected.

Through carefully layering offset circles Faruqee generates the radiant shimmer of pulsating rings of the Circle Paintings. Similarly, the Wave Paintings, developed in conversation with painter David Driscoll, summon the appearance of topological folds through a precise overlapping of curves. A deceptively voluminous bunching recalls the organic distortion of underwater shadows or light bouncing off of gathered fabric. Akin to a Fibonacci sequence, mathematical accuracy quietly underpins ‘natural’ shape.

Anoka Faruqee (b. 1972, Ann Arbor) earned her M.F.A. from the Tyler School of Art in 1997 and her B.A. in painting from Yale University in 1994. In April, her work will be the subject of a solo exhibition at Secession, Vienna. Her work has also been exhibited in the U.S. and abroad at venues including: MoMA/PS1, Long Island City; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo; Björkholmen Gallery, Stockholm; and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco; among others. Faruqee directs graduate studies in painting and printmaking at Yale School of Art. She lives and works in New Haven, CT.