If you need more than an espresso shot to jump start your sense of motivation, take some inspiration from Hermine Ford. The 83-year-old artist is ready to unveil a show of bold new abstract paintings created in the last year. Now entering her seventh decade as a working artist, Ford is a New York City native who is still charging forward and charting new artistic exploration in her TriBeCa studio. Last seen at the New York Studio School in 2019, a new series of work that Ford painted during the pandemic will be unveiled at Furnace Art on Paper Archive in Falls Village, Conn., on Saturday, May 7.
“Hermine Ford: Normally Invisible” will be the debut show of Furnace Art on Paper Archive’s 2022 season, marking the gallery’s return after finishing its first year.
Launched by downtown New York City painter and curator Kathleen Kucka in 2021, the thoroughly modern gallery on Falls Village’s Main Street was conceived as Kucka made the small Litchfield County town her full-time residence.
Located next to the new Falls Village Café and across the street from famed designer Bunny Williams’ 100 Main decor shop, Furnace has been a key piece to the recent commercial revival of downtown Falls Village. With its fresh, minimalist space Furnace has shown large-scale abstract work from contemporary painters like Stephen Maine, Bettina Blohm and Marilla Palmer.
Kucka described the work Hermine Ford will be showing as “the best of her career” as well as an “exciting opportunity to bring this level of art and history to Falls Village.”
Ford’s decade-spanning career has seen her geometrical designs move through different phases; her latest work — intricate patterns of swirling squares, like tiny mosaic tiles — seems to pull from the artist’s extensive time in Rome. The series of paintings in “Normally Invisible” draw to mind excavated pieces from antiquity, but with brilliant jewel tones in circular patterns. Are they ancient sundials or studies of the moon’s changing face?
Art runs in the blood of Hermine Ford and her family. She shares her TriBeCa loft with her husband, fellow New York City native and contemporary painter Robert Moskowitz, whose abstract etchings of human figures in black and white have been showcased at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Her father was the late Polish-born painter Jack Tworkov, a figurehead of the Abstract Expressionist movement and former chairman of Yale University’s art department. His rough, kinetic work that layered vibrant color on color was highly influential and made him a peer of other avant-garde men in the midcentury “New York School” of painting, including Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning.
“Hermine Ford: Normally Invisible” will open at Furnace Art on Paper Archive at 107 Main St. in Falls Village, Conn., on Saturday, May 7, with a free reception from 4 to 6 p.m. For more information, go to www.furnace-artonpaperarchive.com or follow @furnace_artonpaper on Instagram.
