Taney Roniger
“Other Rivers” | February 11th – March 14th, 2020
Robert Berry Gallery is excited to announce Other Rivers by American artist Taney Roniger. Her debut solo show with Robert Berry Gallery opens on February 11th. Other Rivers features large scale charcoal drawings on paper—some of which reach five-foot heights—featuring delicately created surfaces.
“The drawings in Other Rivers are re-creations of some of the tiny gesture drawings I’ve made over the last decade. In working with these gestures, I’m taking something that took two seconds to make and turning it into a large charcoal drawing roughly 100 hours in the making. There’s something funny about that. But my main goal isn’t humor; it’s to capture the energy and uniqueness of that instant that’s lost forever.”
Among the featured works include “Other Rivers #Microscapes #1”, a massive 63 x 48 in | 160 x 122 cm charcoal on watercolor paper work created in 2020, and “Other Rivers #5”, a 50 x 62 in | 127 x 157 cm charcoal on watercolor paper also crated in 2020. The artist states that even though some of the smaller works, such as “Other Rivers #2” are a quarter of the size of the larger ones, the amount of time to perfect each one is almost the same due to the level of patterning, and the dedication to creating a consistent surface across each drawing.
Taney Roniger is a visual artist, writer, and curator based in New York. Her work is in the collection of the Ogden Museum of New Orleans, LA, the Library of Congress, and public collections around the world.
“These drawings are an affirmation and reclamation of form,” Roniger said. “They are a glimpse into the collective consciousness of the moment and a reflection of the specifics of my environment — whatever atmospheric and lighting conditions, what was happening externally and internally. I make the gesture and the result is an authentic record of that moment. There is a yearning for something that was special and that can never happen again, and perhaps that’s reflected in these drawings. Other Rivers is an acknowledgement of time, and in some sense an honoring of the uniqueness of every moment.”
A painter for many years, Ms. Roniger recently turned to drawing, finding it to be the most direct visual expression of the intelligence of the human body. Her work has been shown in a number of venues here and abroad, including: Robert Henry Contemporary, Lesley Heller Workspace, Sperone Westwater, The Islip Art Museum, and StandPipe Gallery in New York; the Contemporary Arts Center and The Front in New Orleans; and the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Her awards and honors in the visual arts include three Yaddo fellowships, a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a traveling fellowship from the Stacey Sussman Cavrell Memorial Foundation. Since 2012, she has been a contributing writer at The Brooklyn Rail, for which she served as Guest Editor in December 2017. Her writing has also appeared in Interalia, Hyperallergic, Whitehot Magazine, Big Red & Shiny, Transverse, and On-Verge. A graduate of Yale University, where she received her MFA, she teaches in the fine arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She divides her time between Queens and the Catskills.
“Taney’s works are deeply meaningful yet accessible for a modern collector,” stated Robert Berry of Robert Berry Gallery. “Other Riversis meant to move and inspire the viewer on the importance of time, what it means to yearn for the past, present and future—and how they are the same in so many ways. Through these bold and beautiful, large-scale charcoal drawings, we can experience the moment up close and really begin to enjoy and understand it.”