Angela Dufresne’s signature compositions, at once grandiose and humble, imagined and believable, scenic and chaotic, connect widely disparate icons of figuration, landscape, movies and urban tableaux into potent mises en scène.
Dufresne typically initiates her oil paintings on canvas with wildly gestural multi-color underpaintings, setting the stage for complexly composed “covers” of historical paintings. Finding kinship with artists such as Gustave Courbet, Joan Mitchell, Carrie Moyer, Catherine Murphy, Alice Neel, John Singer Sargent and Carolee Schneemann, while moving freely between pop cultural references and her own biography, the artist lays open classical themes (genre, figure, landscape, still-life) to social investigations of the present.
Angela Dufresne (b. 1969) was born in Olathe, KS. A solo exhibition of paintings by Dufresne titled Just My Type is currently on view at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz, NY, and another solo exhibition Making a Scene was recently on view at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, in Kansas City, MO. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; MoMAPS1, New York, NY; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; RISD Museum, Providence, RI; National Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Leslie-Lohman Museum, New York, NY; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY; Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; and Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA, among others. The artist is the recipient of numerous awards including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship; Guggenheim Fellowship; Siena Art Institute Residency; Yaddo Residency; Purchase Award, National Academy of Arts and Letters; Headlands Center for the Arts Resident and Jerome Foundation Fellowship. Dufresne currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.