NEW YORK — Sgorbati Projects is pleased to present Impossible Atmosphere, an exhibition of artworks by Kyla Chevrier, Anne Truitt, and Maria Walker. The exhibition was conceived in conversation with artist Gabriela Salazar. The work of influential sculptor Anne Truitt is employed as a starting point to explore the connectivity of painting and sculpture, and the relationship of atmosphere to form, color and surface.

Salazar writes of the exhibition:

The mystery of paint, form, and vision coalescing in the corner of the inner eye to conjure space, light, and mood. How to force the inescapability of material into air, light, and shadow, while simultaneously reiterating—insisting—on materiality? Where do substance, structure, and sublimity abut? What captures, embodies, fractures the impossible precision of atmosphere?

Exhibited is Anne Truitt’s Parva LVIII, 2002, a small, intimate sculpture measuring 12 1/8 by 12 by 3 inches, created two years before the artist’s death in 2004. Through Truitt's meticulous process of applying multiple layers of finely sanded gesso and pigment to a wood structure, color, while still resting on the surface, is relieved from its support. Primarily a pale blue/green, Parva LVIII reveals the reductive nature of Truitt’s work, heightened not only by a shift in scale—her practice most associated with larger, floor standing sculpture—but also through the subtlety of a thin green line towards the base of the work. The color of this line, nearly indistinguishable from the color above, almost tricks the eye to question its existence.

Kyla Chevrier will create a site-specific installation through the construction of vertical planes which interrupt the architecture of the gallery. The given conditions of the room as exhibition space are changed, and the experience of the viewer is altered. Dramatic interventions which structure programatic movement are balanced with the nuance of natural light as it is redirected against the colored surfaces of the installation. The colors are derived from Chevrier’s personal archive documenting the synesthetic relationship of color to specific people and places.

Maria Walker presents work from her Window Series, an ongoing group of paintings based on the dimensions of her studio windows. Walker’s paintings are continually bound by their fundamental materials—wood, canvas and paint. Here, the physical framework of the windows is recalled in the painting’s stretchers, reconfigured to shape unprimed canvas which is then stained with pigment. The physical nature of the work is in contrast to the etherial qualities of their presence. The paintings, almost inexplicably, recreate the movement of light and air through the windows at a given time of day.

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