Franklin Parrasch Gallery is pleased to announce Stillness in Motion, the gallery’s second solo show of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Edith Baumann.

In Edith Baumann’s works, finely-applied lines hover and span, veil-like, across layered rectilinear fields. Inspired by her decades-long meditation practice, the artist mines the sense of focus, balance, and concentration she achieves in a meditative state as she continues to explore the relationship between color and geometry and the tension between stasis and dynamism.

Baumann’s paintings in this show are characteristic of her more than forty-year practice, concisely balancing precision with vulnerability, motion, and natural imperfection. The artist begins her process by thinly applying more than a dozen layers of hand-milled raw pigment acrylic paints in varying shades to achieve a singular hue. Balancing color, texture, and density, she establishes a formal background within which she then paints additional, smaller monochromatic fields. Baumann then overlays mandala-like striated bands and/or highly delineated brush strokes that seemingly suspend and float like wavelengths above the surface. Engaging at once a sensation of vibration and breath, these ultra-fine lines are intended to alter the viewer’s sense of spatial perception.

Contradistinction and tensity are at the core of the visual experience with Baumann’s work; her tonal shifts are essential in allowing for space and movement to permeate linear and precise foundations, furthering a deft balance between perceptions of field and overlaid image.