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Download Trifold Catalog from the 2008 Great Rivers Biennial from the Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis.
Includes interview between Michelle Oosterbaan and Laura Fried.

One created an international relief agency modeled in no small part on the United Nations. Another produced a mnemonic landscape of expanding and receding subjects, inviting the viewer to navigate the amorphous waters of memory. Still a third illustrated two profoundly violent scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, playing with the relationship between viewers and viewed. Read more

For her first solo show at this gallery, Oosterbaan presented eight drawings: five formidably scaled ones pinned directly to the wall – largest measuring 78 by 51 inches – and three smaller framed ones.  Each consists of vignettes in colored pencil and graphite that combine abstract patterns and recognizable images without hierarchic significance.  Read more

LEVITY
Selections Spring 2007

My recent drawings have evolved out of the process of working on temporary installations.  These site-responsive projects enveloped the viewer within rectilinear fields of color, sharp edges of taped lines, and references to the history of architecture.  Each project created elastic environments that integrated the viewer’s shifting perspective. Read more

35 Wooster St. (212-219-2166)—For “Levity: Selections Spring 2007,” fourteen participants selected from the Drawing Center’s artist registry liberate drawing from gravity, in one sense or another. Lisa Perez’s paper cutouts hover on the walls, like clustering spores; Norma-Jean Bothmer’s vivid blue drawings of her Teddy bear resist solemnity. Light is the “pencil” that creates the images in Bill Gerhard’s geometric works, purple sheets of construction paper strategically exposed to sunlight. Read more

“Drawnwork” is an exhibition of works on paper by four artists who employ drawing as a “means to transgress the accepted distinctions applied to past, present and future.”1 Recognizing the powerful role that memory plays in this process, each of these artists strive to establish ways in which the personal, often hermetic nature of the remembered image might yield more open, universal readings. Read more

Michelle Oosterbaan’s large, mostly unframed drawings look like dreams about flying transposed to paper.  A galloping horse here, a dog there, some trees on fire, a house underconstruction (or destruction?). Read more

It’s always fascinating to see what an outsider will make of a particular region’s artistic output, and what he or she as a curator deems capable of contributing to a larger idea – as opposed to simply culling the good from the mediocre and creating a sprawling, meaningless group show.

To its credit, Arcadia University Art Gallery’s group exhibitions almost always project the finger-on-the-pulse, bigger-picture approach, and none more so than the gallery’s 24^th “Works on Paper” biennial. Read more

Recent installation works address some combination of social, personal or perceptual issues.  MICHELLE OOSTERBAAN’s installations lean toward defining perceptual and spatial statements that underpin our social and personal views.  At the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (December 12, 2003 – February 1, 2004) she spread colored rectangles across the walls and floors to make deadpan statements whose drama is present but underplayed.  Read more

Normally paintings on a wall offer the viewer only two spatial orientations.  One can stand close or distant, dead center or off to one side. But Michelle Oosterbaan has created a novel option: standing inside a painting. Read more

Painting is an art on the verge of exhaustion, one in which the range of acceptable solutions to a basic problem—how to organize the surface of a picture – is severely restricted.  The use of shaped rather than rectangular supports can, from the literalist point of view, merely prolong the agony.  The obvious response is to give up working in a single plane in favor of three dimensions.
-Michael Fried
“Art and Objecthood,” 1967 Read more

Though their work is distinctive, Ruth Borgenicht and Michelle Oosterbaan share a feeling for materials and a feeling for material culture. Both are unusually grounded in the present: what it feels like, what it looks like, sounds like, how it shapes itself around us — and, equally, what shaped it. Read more