"Structures of Light" by Michael Banning + Melanie Pankau

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

The exhibition Structures of Light brings together artists Melanie Pankau and Michael Banning, a married couple with artistic practices that share common themes through different genres of painting. Pankau is an abstract painter whose work is grounded in her daily meditation practice and creates precise, layered geometric abstractions that embody subtle states of being.

Banning, is a representational painter who focuses on specific qualities of light and unusual viewpoints within the familiar spaces of the domestic interior.

Although the work of these artists takes contrasting visual forms, the couple weave together similar qualities within the content and processes of their work: a slow process of making, meditative qualities of observation, and the representation of physical and metaphysical light.

Their paintings take shape over many months where numerous revisions are made in the course of creating a painting. The process of slow making elicits slow looking that counters the fast pace of our current culture and is grounding for both artist and viewer. The artists’ studio processes rely on methods that involve the connection of the body and mind to direct experience.

Banning observes the phenomena of light, shadow, atmosphere, and viewpoint within their home and interprets these experiences directly in his paintings. Pankau’s practice is guided by a process of meditation, and grows out of the reflection and contemplation within these quiet spaces. It is in a state of solitude and interiority where the geometric forms and diagrammatic structures in her work originate.

They communicate the idea of light very differently in their work. Pankau’s compositions capture the light that derives from an inner landscape while Banning’s paintings illuminate the light moving through the lived quotidian spaces of their home. Together, their intentions are to create images that are quiet and offer spaces for reflection.

- Michael Banning & Melanie Pankau

Michael Banning Winter Sun 2022 | oil on panel $1,050.00 image: 12 x 12" | unframed

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Michael Banning Backyard View in Winter 2022 | oil on panel $1,950.00 image: 16 x 16" | unframed

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Michael Banning Northern View - Imagined Lake 2022 | oil on panel $1,950.00 image: 16 x 16" | unframed

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Michael Banning Three Doors 2022 | oil on panel $2,300.00 image: 20 x 20" | unframed

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Michael Banning Afternoon Light Through Kitchen Window 2022 | oil on paper $550.00 image: 7 x 7" | frame: 9 x 9x"

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Michael Banning Northern Window View 2022 | oil on paper $550.00 image: 7 x 7" | frame: 9 x 9x"

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Michael Banning House in Shadow and Light 2022 | oil on paper $550.00 image: 7 x 7" | frame: 9 x 9"

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Michael Banning Front Door Window 2022 | oil on panel $925.00 image: 10 x 10" | unframed

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Michael Banning Bay Window 2022 | oil on panel $925.00 image: 10 x 10" | unframed

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Michael Banning Kitchen Door Window 2022 | oil on panel $2,700.00 image: 24 x 24" | unframed

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Michael Banning Pine Tree Window 2022 | oil on panel $1,950.00 image: 16 x 16" | unframed

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Michael Banning Open Window 2022 | oil on panel $1,950.00 image: 16 x 16" | unframed

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Michael Banning Morning Window 2022 | oil on panel $2,700.00 image: 24 x 24" | unframed

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MICHAEL BANNING

Michael Banning was born in Boulder, Colorado in 1966. He received his BFA from the University of Colorado, Boulder and his MFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Banning’s oil paintings and drawings of contemporary American urban, industrial, and domestic landscapes have been exhibited in solo exhibitions in Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, and New York City. His work was recently exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Edward Hopper House museum and study center in Nyack, NY, in 2019.

Banning’s work has also been included in regional group exhibitions at several Midwestern institutions, including Chicago’s Harold Washington Library, the Minnesota Marine Art Museum, the Rockford Art Museum, the Kohler Art Center, the South Bend Regional Museum of Art, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and Manifest Creative Research Gallery in Cincinnati, among others. Banning is the recipient of grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Jerome Foundation, and the City of Chicago, where he lived for seven years. Banning and his wife, artist Melanie Pankau, live in Minneapolis where he teaches at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design and Metropolitan State University.

ARTIST STATEMENT My recent paintings of interiors depict familiar domestic spaces revealed through specific qualities of light. These small paintings are based on observations within my house and its surrounding neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN. The viewer is invited to quietly contemplate these sparsely furnished rooms and bear witness to the passing of light and shadow. The light that floods these rooms is shaped by the geometric frames of windows, doors, and mirrors, as well as the shifting atmospheric conditions of the seasons and the ever-changing angle of the sun. In many of the paintings, the rooms themselves serve primarily to provide a surface for the substantiation of light.

The windows allow light into the rooms, but also admit views of nature and the built environment and hint at the connectedness of interior and exterior worlds. Glimpses of the neighbors’ houses, tress, and sky, offer a greater context for home and mark the borders of interior versus exterior space.

While these paintings engage in the perennial artistic challenges of creating illusionary space, volume, surface, and light, their real intention is to hint at the poetic and symbolic world that breathes behind things.

Michael Banning

Melanie Pankau Points of Transition 2019 | acrylic on panel $3,000.00 image: 20 x 22" | unframed

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Melanie Pankau The State of Being Three 2017 | acrylic on panel $4,500.00 image: 29 x 30" | unframed

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Melanie Pankau Structures of Light 2022 | acrylic on panel $2,600.00 image: 18 x 19" | unframed

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Melanie Pankau Manifold 2022 | acrylic on panel $2,600.00 image: 19 x 18" | unframed

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Melanie Pankau Among 2017 | acrylic on panel $4,500.00 image: 29 x 30" | unframed

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Melanie Pankau In Stillness 2019 | acrylic on panel $3,000.00 image: 20 x 22" | unframed

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Melanie Pankau Source 2022 | acrylic on panel $2,600.00 image: 19 x 18" | unframed

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MELANIE PANKAU

Melanie Pankau received her BFA from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1999, her MFA from University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 2011 as well as studied at the Bauhaus Universtät in Weimar, Germany. Pankau’s work has been shown in regional and national exhibitions at venues including: McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL; Thomas Barry Fine Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Minnesota Museum of American Art, St. Paul, MN; South Bend Regional Museum of Art, South Bend, IN; Charles Allis Museum, Milwaukee, WI; Boston Center for the Arts, Boston, MA; and art fairs Art Miami, FL, and EXPO Chicago, IL. She has participated in several artist residency programs including the Vermont Studio Center, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Pankau is a recipient of a Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs Community Arts Assistance Program Grant and most recently, a 2020 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. Her work is represented by McCormick Gallery in Chicago.

ARTIST STATEMENT My practice as a painter is guided by a process of meditation, and grows out of the reflection and contemplation within these quiet spaces. For nearly a decade, I have been studying a variety of meditation traditions and techniques, and integrating this parallel practice into my paintings. I work at the pace of my hand where images first captured from these meditative states begin with a rough sketch, develop slowly through numerous compositional drawings, and ultimately within the painting itself. Months will pass and copious layers of paint are applied, buried, excavated, and layered atop one another into angular and hard-edged forms that float over luminescent monochromatic backgrounds. The hard edges and sharp lines are softened by color combinations that derive from the light I observe during transitory times of day. The paintings embody a deep, latent, and durational sense of time and act as an archive of various states of being.

It is in a state of solitude and interiority where the geometric forms and diagrammatic structures in my work originate. Specifically, the compositions convey the unseen forces of the energetic fields of the body and subtle layers of consciousness. My intention is to visualize a contemplative consciousness by creating images that are positive, meditative, and mirror our inner and interconnected worlds.

- Melanie Pankau

25 Groveland Terrace, Minneapolis, MN 55403 | www.grovelandgallery.com

To purchase artwork please contact: info@grovelandgallery.com or 612-377-7800