ENGAGE Projects is thrilled to announce our upcoming exhibition PERENNIALS by multimedia artist Sharon Louden. Striking a balance between controlled abstractions and a fluid playfulness in her work, Louden spans installation and painting with gestural strokes and a sculptural mindset. Sometimes acrylic paint, sometimes aluminum sheet metal, Louden’s practice uses planar strategies such as transparency and reflection to explore ideas of space, time-based gesture, and a relationship to interiors. Her blueprint-like paintings will fill the gallery with an aura of understatement, embodying the forever fruitful conflict between order and chaos, nature and built environments. Never more than once removed from the mark-making of a hand, Louden’s materials carry a kinship with the body; this evidence of human touch grounds her approach to art, making the viewer’s relationship to the work an integral part of the piece itself.

Intertwining her painting rhetoric with her advocacy, Louden leads an emboldened art practice in the hopes of demystifying life as a creative. Ventures such as her Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books including Essays by 40 Working Artists, The Artist as Culture Producer, and her upcoming release Last Artist Standing work toward paving a precedent for navigating a lifelong career in the arts.

Louden graduated with a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an I no by MFA from Yale University School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues including the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, the Drawing Center, Carnegie Mellon University, Weisman Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Birmingham Museum of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Louden's work is held in major public and private collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, Arkansas Arts Center, Yale University Art Gallery, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others.

Image: Sharon Louden, detail from Lingering series, 2003-ongoing, Acrylic, watercolor, and gel medium on wood panel