Anne Seelbach

Anne Seelbach received a BA from New York University and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York.

She has developed her art at the MacDowell Colony, Triangle Artists’ Workshop, the Griffis Art Center, New London, CT, and I-Park, East Haddam, CT. She was awarded a painting fellowship at The Bunting Institute, Radcliffe College, Harvard University. Other awards include an Arts Lottery Grant from the Massachusetts/Somerville Cultural Council and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

International art residencies include the Centrum Frans Masereel printmaking workshop, Kasterlee, Belgium, the Frauenmuseum, Bonn, Germany, and the Griffis-Orpheus artist exchange program in Polkovnik Serafimovo, Bulgaria.

Anne has taught at the University of Rhode Island, Northeastern University and Emerson College in Boston, The Newark Museum, NJ, the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY and at the Victor D’Amico Institute of Art, Amagansett, NY.

Her paintings, drawings and other artistic works are included in the permanent collections of the Newark Museum NJ, Lyman Allyn Museum, New London, CT, the Monhegan Art and History Museum, Monhegan, ME, the Long Island Museum, Stony Brook, NY, the Centrum Frans Masereel, Belgium, the Frauenmuseum, Bonn, Germany, and the Smolyan Art Museum, Smolyan, Bulgaria. She is also represented in corporate collections including Continental Grain, Pfizer Inc., Prudential Insurance, XTO Energy as well as university collections and many private collections in the United States and Europe.

"The tidal waters and shoreline of eastern Long Island, NY have inspired my paintings of the last few years. The question “What is happening?” interests me far more than what a scene looks like. What are the unseen physical laws of nature that create each visual element at a particular moment? Changing tides and the rich colors of each season are effects of the earth's gradual rotation around the sun. Water, plants, birds and sea life all follow the dictates of this planetary shift.

My current work, paintings, cut and pasted works-on-paper and assemblages, began when I saw a very unnatural-looking fish in the nearby Upper Sag Harbor. It brought to mind national news stories about mutations in nature caused by toxins in the environment. Pollution is currently being documented in many of Long Island’s water systems: streams, lakes, bays and ocean. My artworks imagine the stress to marine life as chemical and industrial elements seep into the water. Conflict grows between the laws of nature and our artificial attempts to control, or ignore, the environment.

Angular forms, gaskets and other mechanical shapes are incorporated into the paintings, representing man-made substances contaminating the water: toxic chemicals, herbicides, pesticides, rain-water runoff, wastewater, factory discharges and other pollutants. Debris crowds the waters. Fish mutate into imaginary forms. Each artwork is expressive of this new underwater reality.

The assemblages hang on the wall without a frame. Without a constricting edge to confine them, the shapes and spaces expand physically and conceptually, creating an immediate experience for the viewer. I use industrial and geometric shapes, atmospheric color fields and in recent pieces additional textures such as plastic grid, plastic meshes, plastic woven “cloth”, wood and objects found along the tideline. The work is exposed and vulnerable as is the environment it portrays." Anne Seelbach

 

Collision, 2016
Acrylic, plastic cloth, plastic mesh, gasket, paper on cut composition
34 x 21 x 4 in
Courtesy of the artist
$650
Purchase

Dissonance II, 2016
Acrylic on cut paperboard, plastic mesh, and plastic cloth
23 x 17 x 7 in
Courtesy of the artist
$650
Purchase

Sunken Structure, 2016
Acrylic on paper, plastic grid, plastic mesh, color pencil
24 x 27 x 5 in
Courtesy of the artist
$650
Purchase

New World Order, 2010
Oil on canvas
36 x 40 in
Courtesy of the artist
$3,200
Purchase

Troubled Waters #4, 2010
Oil on paper
22 x 28 in
Courtesy of the artist
$2,400
Purchase

Troubled Waters #11, 2010
Acrylic on paper
22 x 28 in
Courtesy of the artist
$2,400
Purchase

Troubled Waters #12, 2010
Acrylic on paper
22 x 28 in
Courtesy of the artist
$2,400
Purchase