MUNICH, GERMANY.-Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers present the first solo exhibition by the US American painter Maureen Gallace (born 1960 in Stamford, Connecticut, USA) in their Munich gallery.

Maureen Gallace's small paintings seem to resist interpretation, completely drawing the observer in. At first sight, these paintings could be considered naive, but when looking at them more closely they turn out to be very complex, profound and difficult to categorize.

Gallace has pursued her own conceptual approach - often painting landscapes that are empty of people, but with isolated buildings indicating the presence of the human. Gallace uses her own private photographs as a source for her paintings. By repeating what appears to be the same subject again and again, she develops a genealogy of the house and of the landscape that provides the space for these dwellings. Despite that the space is clearly defined, the perspective appears deconstructed. Against our knowlege of the permanent construction of buildings, here the houses seem airy and floating, as if created by magic. The picture appears as the concentrate of the memory of a place once seen, like a vision.

Gallace's work is painted in the tradition of American landscape, and especially in the modern intellectual tradition of Cezanne, Hopper, and Ryman, and more importantly of Cornell and Judd.
Her works possess a remarkable, even meditative silence and a completely peculiar originality; they convey the belief in the power of beauty, which can never be fully achieved.

2006 Maureen Gallace had a one-person-exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. In 2005 Gallace exhibited at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa,Texas, and she had a solo exhibition at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland in 2004. A catalogue with text by Rick Moody was published to accompany this exhibition. Previous solo shows include the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas in 2003, the Fukui City Art Museum, Japan in 2001 and the Museum Schloss-Hardenberg in Velbert, Germany in 1996. Gallace's paintings are included in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, Wadsworth Atheneum, the Fondazione Di Vignola, Italy and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.