October - November 2017

Gallery 81435 in Telluride, Colorado presents Blue, an exhibit by Margaret Rinkevich during the months of October and November. The Art Walk reception will take place Thursday, October 5, from 5 – 8 pm.

The color blue has a rich associative meaning.  As an expressive agent, it connotes concepts of despondency and melancholy.  Simultaneously, blue suggests notions of success, achievement, attainment or altruism, selflessness, and stalwartness. For Margaret, the past years were incredibly challenging and included physical relocations, the dissolution of relationships and the death of several beloved friends.  This chromatic scheme has a very visceral physicality that exists as sensations and feelings.  Each shade carries nuances that become more complex when interwoven with one another. BLUE is an attempt to reconcile disconsolation and affirmation.

Margaret is drawn to the rectilinear form and they predominate in her work.  Squares and rectangles ground the painting compositionally and create a framework around which all other elements depend.  These forms provide something of a foil for the more exuberant passages seen in her canvases.  “I love the sheer mental grind of painting.  I love the physical act.  There is always the battle between containment and chaos in my work.  My paintings make me feel simultaneously satisfied, restless, awkward and honest.” 

Margaret Rinkevich has been a resident of Telluride for 16 years.  She holds a B.A. in art history from the University of Arizona, where she specialized in the Italian Renaissance.  She has been dedicated to the arts and has taught art history to university students and museum docents.  She is the author of several publications about tribal art and culture.  As a volunteer for Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Margret wrote about numerous African objects from the collection in Highlights from a Decade of Collecting (2009).  Additionally, she assisted with docent education, research on acquisitions and composed labels for objects on display in the African gallery.  In 2012 she authored an article for Tribal Art magazine entitled “Seeing the Unseen: Visionary Aspects of Eskimo Snow Goggles”. In 2015, Margaret participated in Ah Haa School for the Arts, Second Annual Juried Exhibition of Regional Artists, BEST OF 2014 and contributed to The Telluride Painting School lecture series with a talk entitled, Art of the ‘So What?!’: The History of Still Life Painting.  In 2016 she was one of three jurors for the 3rd Annual Exhibition of Regional Artists. Her work hangs in numerous private collections throughout the US.

The show runs thru November 2017 at Gallery 81435, located at 230 S Fir Street in Telluride, Colorado. Open daily from 12-6 pm, or by appointment.