Audrey Keeperman

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

A brilliant kaleidoscope of squares, Audrey Keeperman’s WYT48-4818 from 2018 embraces the freedom of color and the order of the grid. Each vibrant square is a minute painting that together forms the ‘quadrangle playground for the mind’ typical to Keeperman’s paintings from the Weaver series.

Painting without a predetermined scheme, Keeperman assembles the composition subconsciously by allowing the brushstrokes to come to her in the moment. She is moved by the range of visual and literary imagery she encounters daily and her impressions of these emerge onto the canvas as ‘after-images,’ as she calls them. Nature is particularly evoked in Keeperman’s oeuvre and can be seen in the sunset hues of green, blue, and mauve applied in WYT48-1818. Instead of depicting a landscape by painting each blade of grass, Keeperman uses abstraction like the Impressionists to disassemble the picture and encapsulate the atmosphere of the landscape; sunlight glows from within the composition of arranged squares and glints off what could be a rippling plain and swaying trees at the edges. Through these effects, WYT48-1818 softly calls to mind Impressionist masterpieces such as Claude Monet’s Meules from 1890 – its palette echoing Monet’s pivotal landscape. The sun appears to dip behind a crimson haystack at the upper left quadrant and radiate beams of purple and pink onto the green grass and blue sky at the right of the composition in Keeperman’s work. Just as Monet used kinetic brushstrokes of colors to build these backdrops, Keeperman uses squares of colors to bring to life her whimsical playgrounds that allow the viewer to sense the moment.