ADDS DONNA is pleased to announce, Blindspot, a solo exhibition of works by New York-based painter Niki Kriese. 

Concerned with classic pictorial concepts such as foreground, background, composition, and perspective, Niki Kriese’s paintings—and arguably all paintings to some degree—are about looking. In a process that involves negotiating space through a series of movements that screen, erase, and obfuscate, they are also very much about what is not seen.

Kriese’s abstractions are full of references to observed space. Her use of horizon lines acknowledges the presence and vantage point of a viewer, but a discernible subject is never quite revealed. In several works, Kriese blocks out shapes that read both as figures against a ground and as deliberate obstructions. Recognizing and assigning these kinds of spatial relationships are a part of the perception process by which we make sense of the world. In Kriese’s paintings, however, the relationships are not fixed and pictorial space is confused by the ambiguous nature of abstracted form. 

The title Blindspot refers to moments of visual obscurity. This relates to the foregrounded figures interrupting the scene, but also to an indistinct, hard-to-see connection between artist and viewer. Physiologically, blindspots are present in all vertebrates due to the gap where the optic nerve enters the retina, but they are almost impossible to detect because our brains tend to fill in the missing information. Looking at Kriese’s paintings, viewers perform a similar kind of cognitive replacement, filling gaps in recognition with what is familiar in an attempt to make sense of an impossible space.