Patricia Fabricant “Horror Vacui”

Equity Gallery is pleased to announce “Horror Vacui,” a solo exhibition of new works by Patricia Fabricant. The exhibition title contains an acknowledgement of the Latin phrase meaning “a fear of empty spaces” and marks a continuum of Fabricant’s practice in gouache-based process-driven abstraction.

In the exhibition catalog, Paul D’Agostino, Ph.D., excogitates that, “Patricia Fabricant’s paintings have long been characterized by resplendent palettes, layered treatments, innovative abstractions, compositional precisions, and an optically sympathetic sense of linear finesse that can only be yielded by an artist working intuitively and with manual certainty at once, and with a profound awareness of the pictorial nuances and expressive ranges of the materials at hand. In such an aesthetic space, the artist has created dreamily non-objective color fields and abstract organics, polychrome wood grains and politically cogent figurations, and chromatically charged, deftly interwoven self-portraits. Insofar as visual artworks might exude multisensory stimulation, Fabricant’s paintings furnish a colorfully exuberant playlist of polyphonic deliciousness.” 

Here is a consideration of the paintings from Horror Vacui In the artist’s own words:

“I have a deep and abiding interest in process-driven work, from mandalas and yantras to Aboriginal song-line paintings, Islamic tiles, and the Pattern and Decoration movement. 

I also draw inspiration from spiritualists such as Emma Kunz, Hilma af Klint, Agnes Pelton, and early Kandinsky. My process involves losing myself in a meditative state while immersed in making the work, and a subsequent desire to create that experience for the viewer through the repetition 

of patterned lines, complex layering, and the optical vibrations created by color relationships. I am also interested in the tension between lyrical gesture and tightly controlled patterning. I’m not looking for hard edges or precise symmetry. I’m interested in movement, pattern, density, and perhaps above all the tension of color on color. I embrace visceral, unapologetic, decorative beauty and want to make the viewer’s eyeballs vibrate.”

Horror Vacui opens Wednesday, October 30 and is on view until Saturday, November 23. The weekly exhibition viewing hours are Wednesday to Saturday, Noon to 6:00pm. For more information on this exhibition or other NYAE events, kindly email the gallery at info@nyartistsequity.org.