Artist reception: Saturday, June 24th | 4pm–6pm
 

Nancy Toomey Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Audrey Tulimiero Welch entitled Tree Map Body.

Tree Map Body is an exhibition of twelve abstract works by international Washington-based painter Audrey Tulimiero Welch. In layered map paintings she revisits the urban wooded landscape of her childhood on the East Coast. Time spent walking in this terrain is echoed in tree-like vertical forms contrasted with looping tangled vine-like gestures. Art writer Brian Curtin says, “Welch’s abstract language combines expressive and calligraphic strokes with sharp linear structures, both embedded in and overlaying painterly grounds.”

For the past fifteen years Welch has lived and worked in Indonesia, Thailand, and Australia, which led the artist to focus on the subjects of line, mapping, and place. She says, “I respond to the diagrammatic quality of maps and relate pictorially to how cartography locates place through the use of sign, line, and symbol. In the studio I often transfer maps of my geographic locale into the painted layers as a method of assimilation to unfamiliar countries and codes.”

Welch applies the paint thick and thin, then pours and trowels it with opaque and translucent blocks of color resulting in layered surfaces of vibrant complexity. Art critic Kenneth Baker says, “Welch manifestly invests considerable energy in her constructive process. It appears to involve the layering of color and the masking or subsequent cutting of away of layers, suggesting that she foresees only to a degree a painting’s final state…. Physical detail pulls the eye repeatedly back to the picture surface, making external reference seem superfluous or a mere trace of the artist’s subjectivity.”

Welch’s process is highly instinctual and produced with the swift speed of hand, arm, and body. The use of the body as a painting tool nods to how the tenets of abstract expressionism inform her practice. “I want the viewer to be abducted into the visceral physicality of my paintings.”

Welch earned her BFA from the University of Delaware and MFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. Her paintings are included in numerous international public and private collections including Google, Western Australia’s Ronald McDonald House in Perth, Hyatt Regency in Oman, Four Seasons Hotel, MGM, and Saks Fifth Avenue. Welch’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States, Bangkok, Indonesia, Germany, Singapore, and Australia. Museum exhibitions include Frauen Museum in Bonn, Germany, Coos Bay Art Museum in Oregon, Bade Museum in Berkeley, California, and Museo Italo Americano, San Francisco. She was nominated for the Daedalus Foundation Fellowship in painting. Publications include Fine Art Magazine, Thailand Art and Design Guide, Architectural Digest, New American Paintings, and San Francisco Chronicle.