_________________________________________________________________________

Julie Heffernan
Everything That Rises

Julie Heffernan: Everything That Rises will include 15 large-scale canvases by one of contemporary painting’s most skilled and visionary practitioners. Using traditional painting motifs borrowed from a range of art historical references including Flemish landscapes, 17th-century portraiture, and Rococo interiors, Heffernan’s paintings evoke the skill of the old masters, yet they belong completely to this moment. Her unpredictable and highly imaginative imagery speaks to her abiding interest in issues of gender, class structure, personal narrative, and art historical convention.

The earliest paintings in this exhibition are allegorical self-portraits set in exotic landscapes. In Self-Portrait as Great Scout Leader (1998), Heffernan depicts a small nude boy sporting a Jan Van Eyck red turban, in each of his outstretched hands he holds several leashes attached to miniature animals. In more recent paintings Heffernan moves her complex dramas indoors where she defies the literal definitions of the self-portrait even further. In the Baroque interior of Self-Portrait as Netherworld (2004) a flock of birds and a smoldering ring of fire occupy the painting’s foreground; the artist’s presence is represented only as spectral evidence. Here, the lure of accomplished representational painting gives way to the deeper psychological uncertainties that both haunt and illuminate the contemporary artistic imagination.

Julie Heffernan was born in Peoria, Illinois in 1956. She received her MFA in 1985 from Yale University. In 1996 she received a New York Foundation for the Arts award, in 1995 a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and in 1986 a Fulbright-Hayes Grant. She has shown in numerous one-person and group exhibitions nationally since 1985. Heffernan lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Catalogue
The fully illustrated 72-page exhibition catalogue will feature an introduction by the show’s curator, University at Albany Art Museum Director Janet Riker, essays by novelist A.S. Byatt, artist and writer David Humphrey.

About the Curator
Janet Riker, Director, University Art Museum, University at Albany, brings over twenty years of curatorial expertise to the project. As Director of the Rotunda Gallery in Brooklyn and Assistant Curator at the Drawing Center in New York City, she has organized over thirty exhibitions of contemporary art, architecture and design. She has served on numerous selection panels and has lectured widely about contemporary art and artists’ issues.

Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC
January 22 – April 16, 2006

Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC
May 25 – July 30, 2006

University Art Museum, University at Albany, Albany, NY
August 30 – November 12, 2006