Christine Mottau

Mottau’s drawings, produced between 2002 and 2008, will be exhibited for the first time with a selection of Large-scale black and white abstractions that explore natural forms found from Wellfleet, Massachusetts, to Peterborough, New Hampshire. Created with oil on paper, these works Investigate rhythmic relationships between line, form, and space, reflecting the artist’s ongoing engagement with both the physical landscape and her own perceptual experience.

The New England drawings interrogate the boundary between what is seen and what is remembered. Mottau’s abstractions are not simply translations of landscape into line and gesture—they are fields of inquiry; surfaces where spatial memory and sensory immediacy collide. Through her assertive mark-making, Mottau disrupts the comfort of representation, compelling us to engage with the architecture of experience itself. The forms, suggestive, provide a rhythm of geological time. The design of the forest and swamp vines, and the persistent geometry of stone. Yet, it is in the tension between boldness and restraint that her work finds its eloquence. Each drawing becomes a meditation on the act of perception: the way memory fractures and reconstructs place, the way physical form is constantly reframed by the act of looking. The sense of monumentality here is psychological as much as physical. where abstraction of the landscape is never fixed but always becoming. In this sense, Mottau’s series is less about New England as a location than as a state of mind—a terrain mapped by memory, sensation, and the ongoing dialogue between observer and observed.

Mottau has exhibited her work in solo and group exhibitions in American galleries since the 1980s. She lives and works in New York City and Spencertown, NY, and studied at he Art Institute of Boston and the Museum School of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts.