Alexandre Gallery is pleased to present Emily Nelligan: A Memorial Exhibition, a survey of forty charcoal landscape drawings from the past thirty years. This marks the gallery’s sixth show of Nelligan’s work, and the first since her death last year.

Reclusive and private by nature, Nelligan made drawings for herself, rarely exhibited and avoided attention of any kind. Known only to a very small circle of artist friends and colleagues, she exchanged or gave work to people in the art world such as Lois Dodd, Wolf Kahn, Hilton Kramer, Norma Marin, Richard Pousette-Dart and Meyer Shapiro. Such was her world until 2000. In 2000 the Bowdoin College Museum of Art presented a summer exhibition of Nelligan’s drawings, which brought her first national attention.

These deeply emotive drawings, with their graduated lights and darks, tell of Nelligan’s intimate relationship and connection with a beloved setting and the motifs that she returned to year-after-year. The drawings, often mystical in nature, reflect an enduring devotion to a chosen subject, Great Cranberry Island, and its infinite variability and universality.

The gallery is honored to represent the artist’s estate and the Marvin Bileck and Emily Nelligan Trust. An illustrated catalogue will be published by the gallery on the occasion of this exhibition.