Marenne Welten part of “On Empathy” at Bridget Donahue Gallery

Wed, Jun 29 - Sat, Aug 6  2016

From June 29 until August 6, Dutch artist Marenne Welten will be part of group exhibition “On Empathy” at Bridget Donahue Gallery in New York, NY. The show is organized by Miciah Hussey, and features 18 international artists. 

This exhibition questions the possibility of art making as an empathic gesture that invites shared meditation on lived experience. Netting figures, part-objects, or obscured histories in varied forms and processes, the artists invite others to inhabit subject positions that are simultaneously estranging and intimate. The diverse practices of painting, sculpture, video, drawing, and textile assembled here explore different modes of empathy: the devotional site, the diaristic obsession, or the affective archives.

In this way, each shares a 1 cathexis for the ephemeral, linger on the haptic gesture, and chronicle the homage. Entangling the viewer into relational textures, these 2 forms emerge from the tracing of personal desire through the reflection of another. By sustaining sincere inquiry as a mode of 3 connection, these works explore empathy as an idiosyncratic, imperfect, and essential to-and-fro of the manifest and the mutable. The exhibition seeks to make visible inter-subjective dialogues of interpretation and creation as a call to empathy.

About Marenne Welten

Marenne Welten was born in Oosterhout, the Netherlands in 1959. She went to the St. Joost Academie in Breda, where after she worked as a succesful artist until the present. Her work has made an impact all over Europe, and now finds its US debut at Bridget Donahue Gallery in New York, NY. Among others, Welten’s work was exhibitied at Kabinetten van de Vleeshal in Middelburg (NL), Galerie Krammig&Pepper in Berlin (GE), Spaceburo Antwerp (BE), and De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art in Tilburg (NL). 

About Bridget Donahue Gallery

Bridget Donahue, formerly a director at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, opened her own New York gallery in 2015.  In an interview with the New York Times, Donahue said: “I’m drawn to those who engage with the long game.” With a refreshingly eclectic program, the gallery includes artists of all kinds — older, under-the-radar, anti-establishment — who might otherwise get sidelined in Chinatown’s trend-heavy scene.