Opening Reception: Saturday, October 2 from 10am-6pm *during Art For Arts’ Sake

Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present Dannielle Tegeder: Standing Between Two Worlds. This will be Tegeder's first solo exhibition at Octavia Art Gallery. The works exhibited in Standing Between Two Worlds include nine acrylic and flashe paintings on panel from 2021.  

Blueprints in their essence represent a promise, a not fully actualized reality; they are future-gazing documents of urban progress. Tegeder’s work mines tenderly these two “worlds”, with one foot rooted in the rigid geometric compositions, framing devices that function as both form and plan, the other foot is solidly planted in the promises of the future, and inquires whether architecture can inhabit and inspire a sort of utopia. Nine paintings of varying sizes occupy the gallery space, schematic compositions of interlaced architectural plans intersect with bright acrylic planes of color, almost buzzing in their intensity. Other forms are delicately washed upon the painting's surface, revealing the web of geometric lines underneath. These translucent shapes almost float right off of the panel, bringing these works into physical space. Never fully symmetrical, the forms in Tegeder’s paintings reveal subtly the artist's hand and reckoning of architectural space that results in compositions that almost move into three-dimensionality, further inviting the viewer into the artist's world.

Tegeder's interest in the systems and forms of architectural drawings originated in her upbringing. Her father, a steamfitter, would take her along on jobs; she learned both about architectural form and the bodies that construct it into our known lived environments. This seminal childhood and later interests of the abstract lineages such as the Bauhaus and Russian Constructivists culminates into her work, colorful cosmologies of her imaginings.

Dannielle Tegeder is an artist and professor based in New York City. For the past fifteen years, her work has explored abstraction, architecture and utopist themes. While the core of her work is painting, she frequently employs large-scale installation, video, sound and animation. Having graduated with an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Tegeder’s work has been presented in over 100 gallery exhibitions, both nationally and internationally in Paris, Houston, Los Angeles, Berlin, Chicago, and New York. Some institutional exhibitions include PS1/MOMA, The New Museum, The Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and The Weatherspoon Museum of Art in Greensboro, NC. Tegeder has been the recipient of several residencies and grants including The Yaddo Foundation, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Banff Centre for the Arts, Artist Residency in Banff (Canada), Smack Mellon Studios and Artist Stipend amongst others. Recent exhibitions include a 2021 presentation at The Armory Show in collaboration with New York-based artist Sharmistha Ray, co-founder of the pair's collective Hilma’s Ghost, which was featured in a New York Times article surveying the fair.