May 2 - August 8, 2010
Click to read features and reviews of the exhibition:
The New York Times
The Record
The Star-Ledger
The Morris Museum’s VALERI LARKO: TWO DECADES represents the first large scale survey of the artist’s work, with 40 paintings on view. Artist Valeri Larko’s powerful paintings of landscapes on the urban fringe will be on view at the Morris Museum from May 2 through August 8, 2010.
Behind the Restaurant Depot, Newtown Creek, Valeri Larko, 2009
Thursday, July 29, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
FREE admission Thursday nights
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VALERI LARKO: TWO DECADES is a mid-career survey of Larko’s more than twenty years’ exploration of the drama she experiences at the edges of the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area, particularly the industrial skeletons and salvage sites of New Jersey and the rusting infrastructure of New York City’s outer boroughs. These places, which Larko describes as “where urban culture and nature collide”, have provided rich ground for American artists since the Industrial Revolution, when the machinery, factories, railroads and subways that transformed city life created cycles of use and discard, erect and neglect.
About Valeri Larko
Valeri Larko, in carrying forward American art’s fascination with industrial detritus and the rusting of urban structures, brings these landscapes into their own as pure art. These are landscapes where beauty reigns, where spherical chemical tanks and angular water towers are sculpture, and where the colors of decay are vibrant, indicative of Larko’s respect for decay as a legitimate and beautiful state of life. Mountains of junkyard salvage that society considers blights along the roadsides are treated by Larko as exquisitely rendered formalized architecture interacting elegantly with their surroundings of sky and land. The rotting wood of derelict piers becomes one with their reflection in the water that slowly devours them. Abandoned gas stations are softened by the weeds that overtake them, and the graffiti that adorns their walls. There is no death in these deserted and forsaken locations; there is creative, ongoing life.
Train Bridge, Jersey City, Valeri Larko, 2000
Larko paints on site at locations she is intimately familiar with as a native and long-time resident of northern New Jersey and current resident of New York. Her insistence on being present in the landscape, instead of photographing the location and working in the studio, gives her work an immediacy of experience for the viewer.
“It is in these often-overlooked areas that I find both beauty & pathos, bizarre juxtapositions that reflect how we, as a society, have altered and continue to alter the environment. Growing up and living in Northern New Jersey most of my life, surrounded by endless miles of industrial parks, highways and shopping malls, has fueled my obsession with this landscape.”, Larko says.
Her work has been exhibited in solo shows and group exhibitions, notably at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, NJ; the New Jersey State Museum in Trenton, NJ; Jersey City Museum, NJ; the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC; ACA Galleries in New York, and the Bronx River Art Center, NY.
In 2000, Larko was commissioned by New Jersey Transit and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts to create murals for the Secaucus Transfer railroad station, New Jersey’s largest train station. Larko is the director of the Tomasulo Gallery at Union County College in Cranford, and is a painting instructor at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey in Summit. Larko was raised in Lake Parsippany, NJ, and for many years lived in Summit, NJ. She currently resides in an artists-in-residence converted factory in New Rochelle, New York. She studied at du Cret School of Art, Plainfield, New Jersey; Arts Students League, New York, NY; and the National Academy of Design, New York, NY.
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