Danielle Lawrence: Veils and Grids

Launching Traywick Contemporary’s 2020 exhibition program in support of the Feminist Art Coalition is Danielle Lawrence: Veils and Grids, featuring new works by the Bay Area artist in her first solo show with the gallery. Lawrence’s practice focuses on experimentation with materiality and surface through a hybrid approach that incorporates painting and sculpture. With her work, she questions the accepted truths of traditional materials and categories while seeking to expand the hierarchies around craft versus fine art. With an ongoing interest in the painted shape, gesture or mark that moves beyond the two dimensional plane, she reworks the traditional physicality of a painting by literally deconstructing and putting back together each piece. The physical deconstruction/construction of materials is a metaphor for reworking and rethinking of other cultural norms such as sexuality, gender, and class. Lawrence thinks of her pieces as visual haikus – distilled, powerful moments that merge abstract language and gestures with contemporary cultural realities of fluidity and transformation. Lawrence points to the power of art, music and literature of our time, as the connector between communities that can force dialogue and an open exchange of ideas.