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The arresting, complex drawings of Brunswick-based artist Andrea Sulzer are featured in the Museum's annual summer series bringing attention to unconventional responses to the Maine landscape. Her teeming graphite compositions, both tiny and huge, explore the intimate interstices of the relationship between landscape and memory. The exhibition is the seventh in the Museum’s celebration of unique and unexpected artistic responses to the notion of "landscape."
andrea sulzer: after nature unites a selection of Sulzer’s dizzyingly complex prints and drawings. Sulzer’s works on paper highlight the suggestiveness of landscape without directly referencing it. Her compositions extend from intricately detailed etchings of fragile nests and abject bird corpses to dark, teeming, graphic statements that are both organic and post-natural in their unification of sparse expanses with dense clumps of marks from which emerge pods, cracks, spikes, needles, hairs, and occasional apparitions of human figures. Reflective of Sulzer’s childhood memories, these compositions reference the meeting of observation and imagination and the pervasiveness of time, history, and loss.
Sulzer has earned a baccalaureate degree in French and masters degrees in Forest Biology, Education, and Fine Arts. She has worked as an instructor of English as a second language, a field ecologist, lab instructor in plant physiology, scientific illustrator and an instructor in Studio Art and Drawing. Her work has been exhibited internationally at galleries as varied as Plane Space in New York City, the Atrium Gallery in London, Sowaka Gallery in Kyoto and at the Tramway Gallery in Glasgow, Scotland. Additionally, Sulzer’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at ICON Contemporary Art in Brunswick, Maine and the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland.
An exhibition catalogue with a pull-out poster of one of the drawings will be available in the Museum Shop.
Pictured above:
Andrea Sulzer, American, spillway, 2006, ink on paper
