Findlay Galleries is delighted to present Significant Colour, Ptolemy Mann’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery and her second in New York. This exhibition introduces a striking new body of work that unites three interrelated approaches: hand-dyed and woven works, paintings on canvas, and Mann’s innovative “Thread Paintings,” in which weaving and painting merge into a single, radiant surface.

Across this new series, Mann continues her long-standing exploration of the boundaries between textile and fine art. Her expansive canvases glow with atmospheric gestures and luminous color fields that evoke abstracted landscapes, while her woven works distill color into refined, minimal compositions. The “Thread Paintings” bring these languages together—painted veils hover above woven grounds, creating layered dialogues between structure and surface, gesture and precision, spontaneity and control.

Ann Coxon Essay

“Ptolemy Mann’s woven artworks have long been concerned as much with the histories and possibilities of painting as those of hand-loom weaving. For inspiration, she looks to the works of Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler more than those of Anni Albers or Sheila Hicks. But what does it mean for an artist to paint onto a weaving; to apply a brushstroke to her own hand-woven, stretched and framed cloth; to layer a split-second, vibrant gestural mark over a painstakingly dyed and woven coloured ground? Mann’s recent work poses precisely this question. To feel our way towards an answer and to fully appreciate the boldness and significance of this move, we need to begin to unravel the long, complex and mostly unequal relationship between painting and weaving.

Most recently Mann has created a new series of Thread Paintings in which free, gestural strokes of colour are painted onto her tightly woven panels. Given the time and labour needed to create her hand-woven surfaces, this is a courageous step. Breaking the ‘rules’ of both weaving and painting, Mann’s brushstrokes are loaded with paint and with meaning. They could be seen as a violent obliteration of the woven surface, yet the paint adds more colour, sitting in juxtaposition and harmony with the woven ground, sometimes soaking and bleeding into the fibres, sometimes appearing to float on top. Dyed colour and applied colour sit together, complicating the distinction between structure and surface, the woven and the painted, the thread and the trace. In Mann’s work, the thread becomes the trace and the trace becomes the thread. Woven threads suggest painted marks and painted marks bleed into woven threads in a fluid, fugitive process. In other words, painting and weaving become indistinct in effect, if not in process. Ptolemy Mann is a weaver who paints with thread and an artist who paints on thread. She is both a weaver and a painter creating works in which the categories of painting and weaving become unstable, running into each other. In this way, her work introduces equality to the centuries-long relationship between painting and weaving.” 

– Ann Coxon
(Curator, Formerly of Tate Modern, UK)
From her Essay for the monograph ‘THREAD PAINTING’

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