Mimi Bates

• Mimi Bates artistic description of a rising sun, a midnight walk, fallen leaves and strewn pine needles intimately woven by the wind, quiet fogs, anonymous graffiti scrawled on walls and sidewalk; are expressions of love, sex, war and hate, Bates exemplifies these emotions through salvaged and transformed etchings in black, grey, rust, and taupe granite effects, absorbed by the oil, the wax, the acrylic, in the very texture of her abstract paintings. The cause and effect dissolve into more abstract forms, albeit the substance at the origin of her inspiration. She vets the contingency inherent in the object or debris and in doing so suggests its enduring necessity.

   

  Bates’s work is in artistic dialogue with Twombly, Rauschenberg, and Rothko, among others. Her asymmetrical bi-polar masses of color may apprehend a point/counterpoint in sync with Rothko’s own renowned series of “Untitleds”. In spite of her affinity for Rauschenberg’s collages, her aesthetics gently lead away from his recognizable fragments of images and objects. Mimi Bates’s debris is situated elsewhere, as the silent caress of the unrecognizable Indian-summered leaf becomes metaphysical.

   

  Bates work can be found in private and permanent collections such as the Al Phillips Corporation of Honolulu, Hawaii, the Villa Lido Corporation of Venice Beach, California and the Friedheim Gallery of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland.

   

  Mimi Bates attended the Corcoran College of Art and Design, in Washington D.C., where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts, before attending graduate school in Baltimore, Maryland for her Master of Fine Arts, at the Maryland Institute College of Art.