This presentation pairs two Los Angeles artists, Alise Spinella and Marc Pally, who both produce dense abstractions. Taut, introspective, personal worlds, generated through intuitive processes.

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Marc Pally was represented for 25 years by legendary LA galleries Ulrike Kantor and Rosamund Felson throughout the 1980s and up to 2010. His works are included in the collections of almost every major museum in Southern California: LACMA, MOCA, the HAMMER, the Orange County Museum of Art, UC Santa Barbara, the Weismann at Pepperdine, as well as other intuitions around the country.

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In recent years he has quietly, but diligently, been working in his studio on labor intensive new paintings that are only now being seen. In a new catalog essay, Constance Mallinson writes of his marks that “the associations seem endless: finely veined leaves, hairy roots, mycelia, vital organs, helical and molecular chains, drapey vines, amoebas, planaria, cross sections of plant and animal tissue, insects, reptiles, sea creatures, algae, entrails.” They “simultaneously evoke tiny cells and galactic events”. Like Ray and Charles Eames film Power of Ten, Pally’s works seem to remind us of astounding structural congruities in the universe over logarithmically increasing scales, yet his works are abstractions. His improvisational graphite gestures expand intuitively without a set course or plan, growing like coral across over the cloudy sea of layered painted surfaces, of obscured colors. They remind viewers of the interconnectedness between forms and entities. Pally got an MFA from CalArts in the late 70s, and was then an early director of the non-profit Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). After exhibiting for over two decades he focused on curating public art projects, starting around 2005, working with artists such as Todd Gray, Renee Green, Jenny Holzer, Michael McMillen, Nam June Paik, Steve Roden, Jennifer Steinkamp among many others.

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Alise Spinella’s intimate paintings trace the body’s psychological states and elusive physical phenomena. She relates that “This new work was made in a period of grief and depicts the internal landscape during a process of dissolution and change, of metabolizing loss...” The central images of the paintings are amorphous, outlined shapes with almost figurative presence. Each hints at a once-gridded form, since disrupted, in a cycle of erosion or renewal. In another long-term project, titled Meditation Drawings, Spinella uses her body as an instrument to chart the sounds of her breath and heartbeats using a gestural language. The resulting marks are not only balancing acts of color and form, but evidence of a performative process. Time is an essential component to their generation, and is then embedded in the finished artworks. In her practice, like in Pally’s described above, drawing and painting are interwoven. A wide array of materials and techniques are used throughout: acrylic glazed over pastels and graphite; gouache and charcoal erased with water, leaving ghostly imprints; thick, porcelain-smooth paint mediums sanded down and built up. Through these repetitive acts, each piece acquires a patina of layers that alludes to the changes inherent in the passage of time. Spinella is Panamanian American, and was raised in both California and Koyasan, Japan. She received an MFA from CalArts, a BA in Psychology and Computer Science from UCLA, and a BFA from RISD. Between these undergraduate degrees she worked at startup companies as a technical project manager. Her artwork has been shown nationally and internationally, in New York, Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, Rome, and frequently around Los Angeles. She was awarded a California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists in 2015.