Violet Dennison

Bortolami is pleased to present Violet Dennison’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opening April 24 in the Upstairs. The exhibition brings together a suite of new paintings, marking an accretive zenith of her elastic visual vocabulary. For the past five years, Dennison has developed a recurring floral form derived from Jacob’s Ladder, deploying it across diverse scales, chroma and compositional frameworks. Rather than functioning as a stable motif, it operates as a mutable form, one that accumulates, fragments and recombines across the surface of the paintings. Dennison’s paintings serve as sites of multiple, often competing, logics, drawing from sources as wide ranging as Damascus tiles and Qing Dynasty ceramics, all the while enduring the digital pressures of cropping, stretching, and layering. At the core of her practice, painting and sculpture, is the tension between the physical quality of the artist’s hand and its tools, from brushes and squeegees, and their directive logic under a digital compass made up of masking and vectors. Refusing resolution, the work sustains these structures of art making in tension, so that they take place within, and stem from, an artificial, generative ornamental system.