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NELLIE KING SOLOMON: Blindsided
May 17 – June 30, 2002.
Open Tuesday - Saturday, Noon – 5pm and by appointment.

Special installation by Bay Area conceptual artist David Ireland

Preview the art of Nellie King Solomon >>

Nellie King Solomon
Last summer, a fresh talent garnered remarkable attention at the annual July Introductions Season of the San Francisco Art Dealers Association. The art critics of
the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner highlighted Nellie King Solomon’s paintings. She was nominated for the prestigious emerging artists’ awards (SECA) from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, stirring response from critics and collectors with her powerful, lyrical paintings. In November, her work was the centerpiece of the Julie Baker Fine Art inaugural exhibition Baker’s Dozen, featuring emerging painters from around the country. The gallery is now pleased to present a show devoted to the latest work of this exciting young painter. Opening May 17, 2002 at Julie Baker Fine Art, Nellie King Solomon: Blindsided, provocative work of unsettling beauty.

"Everything that has happened in the last year has been hard, " says Solomon. " I call this body of work "Blindsided" because our world has been caught off guard. I went to New York after the September attacks, to help a friend make a movie, and found myself drawing the collapse. My paintings, which seem abstract, are visual and emotional responses to the experience of being taken out of the consciousness you were in before."

Solomon’s large field paintings are made on translucent industrial plastics, stained in what critic Kenneth Baker called "unforced lushness and pleasures in rich pools of color." He notes, "The flux and bleed of pigment recall the marks left by melting ice in Andy Goldsworthy’s icicle drawings."

"Air"(detail) - Nellie King Solomon
Solomon’s work is a very contemporary example of the Great Western Imagination - grappling with scale, natural metaphors and maverick energy. But she is also deeply shaped by modernism – as the daughter of two distinguished designer/architects, she is engaged in current concern with space, intention, light and structure. "I make paintings for architecture. The wall misbehaves to reveal a painting." She was educated at Cooper Union, UC Santa Cruz and completed her MFA at the California College of Arts & Crafts in June. She worked as an assistant to conceptual artist David Ireland. It is fitting that David Ireland/ Richard Baker’s installation, deconstructing conventions of vernacular architecture at Julie Baker Fine Art, will arch over Solomon’s work. " I make the space in between things. I paint what I know is there but cannot see. Empty space allows motion." Solomon explains how " the liquid marks leave evidence of something having happened there. The slick paint attracts and repels like oil spills or hot toxic color fields. The translucent surface allows the edges to disappear into the wall. The paintings are subversive architecture."

This body of work builds on Solomon’s signature mingling of tension and ecstasy, drawing inspiration from the traffic of life. Solomon explains that she spends time driving and talking on a cell phone, activities she sees as compiling and spilling collective consciousness, participating in something too big to see. Her paintings are too big to see all at once as she is making them, but the patterns travel through, generating the impulses and pulses of the painting. Like body action painters from Motherwell to Keifer, Solomon is intellectually, viscerally and emotionally tied to landscape – inside and out. "Blindsided" expands her strengths and delicacy.

Julie Baker Fine Art is a new venue for contemporary art that offers cutting edge exhibitions, collector's services & cultural activities. The gallery's mission is to educate and celebrate the creative influences that ignite contemporary art. Julie Baker Fine Art is drawing on art resources from around the country and bringing them to Grass Valley in California's Gold Country. Artweek praised the addition to the California cultural scene with the comment "Although no one quite remembers who made the pronouncement that painting is dead, recent shows at MoCA, SFMOMA and Julie Baker Fine Art have made it abundantly clear that painting is definitely alive and well." The setting is bucolic; the aesthetic is sophisticated and contemporary.