Julie Bozzi
Landscape Paintings

Talley Dunn Gallery
October 24 – December 13, 2014

For her exhibition Landscape Paintings, Bozzi has created a series of fourteen small-scale, gouache on paper paintings that present landscapes at various times of day and season, each an intimate study capturing the play of light and color. Most of the paintings present familiar scenes along the highway or just outside the city, such as fields, parking lots, and isolated buildings. With an emphasis on the play between man-made structures and the more fluid lines of natural forms, Bozzi’s landscapes are remarkable in their ability to capture the psychological impact of the place depicted with the artist’s concentrated treatment of all the details.

By painting scenes that are often forgotten or overlooked, Bozzi documents such spaces very directly, without an inclination toward the sublime or romantic. With a frontal approach to the depiction of the site, the artist brings the viewer directly into the landscape, at times with a dry sense of humor in her choice of subject matter, as seen in works such as Damaged Hedge and Geodesic Domes. The vantage point of Parking Lot Near the Ocean sets up a curious expectation for a faraway vista of waves but leaves the viewer only with a pair of tiny palm trees, but Bozzi answers the viewer’s anticipation with the layered scenery presented in Scenic Drive with Ocean View.

Born in San Jose, California, Bozzi now lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas. The artist received a B.F.A. degree from the University of California, Davis, in 1974 and completed her M.F.A degree from the same institution in 1976. Bozzi has won several prestigious honors, including the Award in Painting from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation in 1987, an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1989, and a Fellowship in Fine Arts by the John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2005. Bozzi’s paintings can be found in museum collections across the country, including the Dallas Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.