MAUREEN GALLACE

Early Years

Gallace was born in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1960. She earned her BFA from The Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford in 1981 and her MFA from Rutgers University in 1983. The rural and coastal scenery of her New England upbringing has been a persistent inspiration for her art. Gallace lives and works in New York City, where she is also an instructor at New York University and has taught at UCLA, Cooper Union, and Harvard University.

Maureen Gallace Artworks

Gallace’s contemporary art practice centres on painting, with a focus on modest, uninhabited landscapes and buildings. Working in oil on panel, she employs a wet-on-wet technique to create flattened perspectives and visible brushwork, omitting extraneous detail to evoke a sense of universality and timelessness. Her approach has drawn critical comparisons to Edward Hopper, Milton Avery, and Giorgio Morandi, yet Gallace’s art is uniquely her own: each painting is a meditation on stillness, memory, and the quiet tension between familiarity and mystery.

Landscapes, Abstraction, and Vernacular Architecture

Since the early 1990s, Gallace has painted scenes of rural New England—windowless white houses, barns, beach shacks, and stretches of coastline. These images, often based on specific places but transformed through memory and simplification, are rendered in a restrained palette that can shift from the soft glow of summer to the stark light of winter. The absence of people and the omission of architectural details invite viewers to project their own associations onto the work, heightening the sense of solitude and contemplation.

Gallace’s paintings are celebrated for their subtle abstraction and atmospheric light. Critics have noted the way her compositions hover between representation and abstraction, with each painting serving as a quiet reflection on psychological and geographical distance. Her recent drawings, as seen in her 2024 Gladstone Gallery exhibition, distil her imagery to even more reductive gestures, examining the space between documentation and invention.

Select Awards and Accolades

• Artist in Residence, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2005)
• Work included in the Whitney Biennial (2010).

Exhibitions

Maureen Gallace has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions at important institutions and galleries. Below is a selection of exhibitions.

• Clear Day, MoMA PS1, New York (2017)
• Maureen Gallace, La Conservera, Ceutí, Spain (2011)
• focus: Maureen Gallace, The Art Institute of Chicago (2006)
• Concentrations 43: Maureen Gallace, Dallas Museum of Art (2003)
• Maureen Gallace, Museum Schloss-Hardenberg, Velbert, Germany (1996)
• Maureen Gallace, Fukui City Art Museum, Japan (1996)

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Ocula | 2025