Galen Cheney

Pressing the Flesh

2015

Galen Cheney was born in Northridge, California, though has lived most of her life in New England where her ancestors first arrived from England in 1620. She currently lives and works in North Adams, Massachusetts, a burgeoning little city that is home to Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art “MASS MoCA”. Cheney has been a committed abstract painter since she began her MFA program at MICA in Baltimore in 1988. Combining the intuitive methods of Abstract Expressionism with an eye toward contemporary collage, textile art, and graffiti, Cheney’s richly layered, constructed paintings are fresh and current. Though entirely abstract, her paintings pulse with a contemporary energy. Their imagery and textures evoke a range of urban sensibilities, from glass high rises to gritty sidewalks. Her current work can be traced back to a pivotal experience she had in China during a three-month residency in 2015, when she began exploring the ideas and methods of collage in earnest. A profound feeling of dislocation and otherness fueled a potent studio practice, where the spoken word fell away and her visual language was the ultimate currency. Though object-like and very much hand made using traditional and non-traditional materials, Cheney’s paintings evoke a clear sense of the spiritual, of something beyond our collective understanding, functioning at a deeper level. It is this quality that allows the work to reach out and cross-manmade boundaries and borders. Cheney’s works are in museums and private collections in U.S.A., Canada, Europe and China.