Heide Fasnacht: Strange Attractors

VCUarts Anderson Gallery is pleased to present the first mid-career survey of the work of New York based and internationally acclaimed artist Heide Fasnacht. The exhibition titled: Heide Fasnacht: Strange Attractors is curated by Ted Potter, Director of the Anderson Gallery in collaboration with Douglas Walla of Kent Gallery, New York. A full-color catalogue accompanies the exhibition with essays by internationally known playwright and art collector, Edward Albee and by Raphael Rubinstein, Senior Editor of Art in America.

Featuring a remarkable collection of the artist’s work, Strange Attractors tracks Heide Fasnacht’s relentless drive and passion over the past decade of sustained production. Her work is a union of opposing forces of nature. Chaos predominates as well as more meditative and celebratory factions in her work. As Raphael Rubinstein has written in his exhibition essay, “By turning her attention to instability in all its realms…. Fasnacht has created, in the mediums of sculpture and drawing, a kind of poetics of catastrophe.” Heide Fasnacht creates in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional mediums, equally comfortable in both, her work is a hybrid between them. Doug Walla, Founder and Director of Kent Gallery comments, ”Working since the 70’s, Fasnacht’s art derives from the phenomenological examination of experience and the notion of objectivity. Focus centers on the process of perception rather than mere representation.“

The exhibition includes Fasnacht’s most important two-dimensional work over the past decade including her graphite Sneeze series, the REM series, the new colored pencil Rain on Window series and the Explosion series from 1998-2001. Other two-dimensional works in the exhibition include: Three Buildings (2001), and Breaking Glass (2004). Her important three-dimensional sculptural works of the past decade in the exhibition include: Exploding Champagne Bottle (2003), Demo (2000), and Exploding Plane (2001). Additionally, Fasnacht will install the site-specific installation, Imploding Wall (spring/summer of 2001) at the Anderson Gallery for this exhibition. Although created in the spring and summer of 2001, this is the first time the installation will be on view to the public. Fasnacht is a virtuoso with her application of unusual materials and methods in creating her works. She comments in Raphael Rubinstein’s exhibition essay, “It is important to stay like a stranger to the material so that I’m always in the process of discovery.”

Since Fasnacht’s first one-person show at P.S. 1 in 1979, she has had over 25 solo exhibitions of her work in the United States. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, notably the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and several awards from the National Endowment for the Arts. Heide Fasnacht received her B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence and her M.A. from New YorkUniversity. Strange Attractors is the first major exhibition of Fasnacht’s work in Virginia.

In conjunction with her exhibition, Strange Attractors, Heide Fasnacht will be giving a lecture on Thursday, September 23rd at 4pm at VCU’s Grace Street Theater located at 934 W. Grace St, Richmond, Virginia. The event is free and open to the public. Strange Attractors will be on view at VCUarts Anderson Gallery through December 5, 2004.

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Heide Fasnacht: Strange Attractors