Exhibition Titled “Pond Edge” by Michael Mazur at Mary Ryan Gallery

NEW YORK, NY.- Pond Edge focuses on Michael Mazur’s use of water, especially pond imagery, in paintings, prints and works on paper from the mid 1990s through 2008. On view are paintings, oils on vellum, and experimental monoprints that are being exhibited for the first time. The gallery has represented Michael Mazur (1935-2009) since 1990.

Bodies of water and water itself have been constant sources of material and inspiration for Mazur. Ever drawn to the fluidity of the natural world and its capacity for self-renewal, Mazur found systems and structure in nature which he translated into art. Over time, his water imagery transformed from linear, realistic depictions to colorful and complex Wakeby landscapes, to the multilayered Pond Edge abstractions.

In the painting Pond Edge II, representational space dissolves completely; composition is defined only by passages of color and hints of form which advance and recede. The cascading forms and floating shapes, which are a trademark of Mazur’s imagery, seem simultaneously of land, water and body. Inspired by the compositional structure of ancient Chinese landscape paintings, his island forms and pond growths developed into layers of abstraction with varying perspectives and multiple horizon lines.

Mazur made his first Pond Edge etching 1997. This was the first of seven editioned prints (Pond Edge I – VI and Storm Warnings) that he continued making through 2008 along with numerous paintings, monotypes and drawings that share this imagery and demonstrate his virtuosity in each medium. All of the Pond Edge works showcase Mazur’s mastery of color and painterly surface while revealing his extraordinary ability to construct a distinct and ever-changing world that blurs abstraction and realism.

Michael Mazur (1935-2009) was born in New York, NY. He lived and worked in Cambridge and Provincetown, MA. His work has been the subject of numerous group exhibitions and over eighty solo exhibitions at museums including the Albright Knox Gallery, the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His works have been acquired by the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, MA, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Springfield Art Museum, MO, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Yale University Art Gallery among others.