Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening on November 17, 2009 of Jasmina Danowski: Quite a Little Bit, including abstract works in ink and gesso on paper and oil and alkyd on wooden panels. Since moving from Tübingen, Germany, to the United States in 1987 and to New York in 1990, Danowski has been a studio painter who has drawn on a rich range of references, from literature to memories to passing conversations.

Representing a turning point in her art, the latest works, comprising her third exhibition at the gallery, were inspired by a number of recent trips she took to Eastern Long Island. Initially visiting Montauk as well as the North Fork wine country to relax and vacation for the first time in many years, she was surprised by the beauty of the landscape and its wildness and felt compelled to explore a new vocabulary of forms and colors inspired by her experiences. She finds painting "a way of embracing and relating to the landscape with your body," expressing what she has found to be unexpected on the East End. She remarks (with a smile), "There are bears on Long Island."

In painting Long Island, Danowski draws directly on her own experience rather than on that of other artists who have worked in the area for decades. This unmediated method is typical of Danowski, who believes in the importance of seeing and exploring for oneself rather than simply accepting conventional thinking.

As in the past, Danowski makes her own inks and paints and works with a tough, rigorous self-critical eye. She creates her images intuitively, investigating the properties of each medium for herself as the work evolves. Each color or mark is deliberately thought out in relation to a work as a whole. More closely evoking real places than in the past, these new images draw us into the mood of these places through works in which notes of transcendence are leavened with humor or tempered with moodiness, although a spirit of openness and optimism pervades.

In the painting Quite a Little Bit, a blue dot holds firm within floating yellow reflections, while drawing our eye upward toward prismatic forms in motion. Says Who is a looping conversation in which we sense argument and agreement, with some of the artist's "flowers," rendered with the sensuous texture of ice cream and whipped cream. Hand in the Cookie Jar has an expansive, uncontrolled feeling, expressive of the way pleasure is an animating force for Danowski. Life Line could be seen as a collage of stylized abbreviations. It reminds us of a cropped view of the Atlantic Ocean as a rich resource for marine life, surrounded by buzzing sprouting merlot leaves, while the title recalls Winslow Homer's Life Line (1884), a painting the artist has long admired. Neap Tide was inspired by the view from a North Fork beach to the shore across the bay, while Meridians Ago evokes reflections and sea life washed by thin surf.

Jasmina Danowski was born in Stuttgart, Germany, and received her B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute (1990), and her M.F.A. from Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (1997). She received two Pollock-Krasner awards (2001 and 2005), and has shown her work at the Boston Center for the Arts (2000); Dumbo Arts Center Festival, Brooklyn (2003); Paradigm Art, Inc., New York (2006); the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina (2006); and Spanierman Modern, New York (2007 and 2008).

View Jasmina Danowski's previous exhibitions at Spanierman Modern, Jasmina Danoski: Surf on By (2007) and Tales: New Work by Jasmina Danowski (2008).