Hannah Bureau
Artist-in-Residence, July 1-14

Hannah Bureau will be artist-in-residence at ANNEX Arts Center, Castine from July 1 – July 14, 2017. While in town she will be working on new paintings and hosting a few events. She will have open studio times when she first arrives, Monday July 3, 11-3PM, and after that - if the curtains and door are open and especially if the open flag is up the public is invited to come in and have a peek at what she’s up to.

Monday, July 3, 11-3PM - Annex Open Studio hours - come by and meet new Artist-in-residence, Hannah Bureau, @ the ANNEX
Saturday, July 8, 2-5 PM - Painting Demonstration + Q&A with Hannah Bureau. Hannah will Paint while explaining both her techniques, motivations, and influences.
Friday, July 14th, 12-3 PM - Kid's Drop-in-and-Draw, at the ANNEX. We'll provide materials and a few artists. Kids can come in a do some work-on-paper.

Hannah Bureau is a name on the lips of many art-enthusiasts these days. It seems she just can’t make a painting that isn’t sublime even though she tries.  Hannah is a 3rd generation female painter in her family. She moved from Paris to Cambridge, Massachusetts at age 8. Her mother and grandmother were artists and her father was an architect. Growing up she was bathed in aesthetic bounty and surrounded by artwork that was influenced by most of the historical art movements from the last century-and-a-half. The result, in Hannah Bureau’s paintings, is a compelling tension of contemporary gestures and techniques with interesting visual allusions to mid-century abstraction, and also some compositions and palettes reminiscent of the 1910’s – giving not the impression of “neither here nor there” but an inexplicable pleasure of an uncanny collapsing of times and styles that is entirely unique and satisfying. In conversation with the artist she reveals, “I try to intervene in the beauty, I try to disrupt simple visual pleasure, I aim for ugly moments but usually come up short and they’re not ugly at all.” It’s true. With that in mind it’s exciting to evaluate the mark-making and gestures on Bureau’s canvases where you can almost trace her layers and moments of interventions that always seem to add up to something rich, fascinating, and harmonious.

Hannah Bureau generally paints from memory. Her works range from pure landscape to pure abstraction but most of her pieces fall exactly in-between the two. There is an intoxicating push-me-pull-you of recognizable moments in the midst of abstract and sumptuous painted surface. Her work is compelling because it is generous and the viewer can get lost in the work with their own impressions.

“My paintings are just at the intersection of landscape and abstraction. I am interested in creating space and distance that feels like the familiar world around us but is ambiguous, general, and abstracted. In my painted world I want visual plains and geometric shapes to intersect, overlap, pile-up, and ultimately create a sense of visual distance and depth that we can identify with.”

Hannah Bureau attended The Putney School, Bard College, is a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design (BFA), and The Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MFA). She was selected as an outstanding graduate student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design for Boston Young Contemporaries at Boston University’s 808 Gallery in both 2007 and 2008. Hannah Bureau’s mentors include John Imber and Eric Aho. Her paintings have been exhibited at outstanding galleries and art fairs up and down the East Coast. She has worked as a freelance graphic designer, and for Houghton Mifflin Company’s children’s textbook division. Hannah works in an old textile mill that has been converted into artist spaces and lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts with her husband, dog Mayzie, and twin girls, Isla and Elsi.