Kathryn Markel Fine Arts – Bridgehampton - is pleased to announce the exhibition “Josette’s World” an exhibition of 17 drawings and watercolors by Josette Urso hung in one great, gallery wall that highlights the diversity, energy, and inventiveness of Urso’s watercolors and drawings.
Urso’s works on paper are an urgent, immediate attempt to capture the visual variety and specificity of her environment. Whether working in plein-air during her travels or looking out over the sweeping view of Brooklyn from her studio, Urso employs her peculiar, energetic visual language of detailed acrobatic forms to heighten and expand the experience of a place, of a room, of a life of ordinary things. These works on paper – these unique visual representations of Josette’s World - are endlessly fascinating in their density and detail.
She says, “I am governed by intuitive leaps of scale, color and wayward geometry. Contrasts and cross-fertilizations unfold and are cumulative, non-linear, free flowing and interpretive. Space becomes an ambiguous and malleable substance and I delight in its manipulation as I meander acrobatically in a kind of gymnasium of convoluted mark making and image collision. All along the way, I engage the known as well as the unknown in unforeseen ways.”
Josette Urso received her MFA in Painting from the University of South Florida in Tampa. Urso's work has been exhibited widely across the country, including the New York Public Library, The Drawing Center, and the Bronx Museum for the Arts. She has been awarded numerous grants and residencies, in particular, from the National Endowment for the Arts, Basil H. Alkazzi, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation as well as the Camargo Foundation and Yaddo, The Alma B.C. Schapiro Residency in Sarasota Springs, NY and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Urso lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
