Denny Gallery is pleased to announce Idée Fixe, a solo exhibition by Emily Noelle Lambert running from October 17 to November 15, 2015.

Emily Noelle Lambert makes intuitive, vibrant paintings and sculptures that draw from diverse art historical movements, cultures, and styles. The exhibition will feature an environment of paintings and sculptures in dialogue with each other, exploring dimensional and pictorial space.

Lambert’s paintings encompass referential and non-objective forms of abstraction as well as figuration. The paintings are rich in color and texture and engender loose, non-linear narratives. Often Lambert attaches wooden sculptural appendages to the paintings, allowing the painted images to extend beyond the rectilinear constraints on the stretchers in playful and unexpected ways.

Lambert’s sculptures are essentially intuitive and sensitive responses to her materials, mostly found or discarded wood, foam, steel, and other objects. The objects are often stacked, suggesting totemic forms. She paints the sculptural forms both as a painting surface and as a gestural shorthand for her intervention in the materials. Her most recent sculptural work has developed with the help of her brother, Peter Lambert, a blacksmith. These recent sculptures are made from wood found in a barn in New Hampshire and completed in West Virginia where her brother lives.

The title of the exhibition, Idée Fixe, is a synonym for “fetish,” an object imbued with special power. It is a French phrase defined as a desire, obsession or fixation of the mind, and is a starting point for how Lambert considers this new body of work.

Emily Noelle Lambert was born in 1975 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and lives in New York City. She received her M.F.A. from Hunter College in New York and her B.A. in Visual Art from Antioch College in Ohio. Idée Fixe will be her seventh solo gallery exhibition in New York City, following exhibitions with Lu Magnus, Regina Rex, and Priska Juschka Fine Art. She has also exhibited at The Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, FL, Asya Geisberg Gallery in New York City, Thomas Robertello Gallery in Chicago, and Allegra LaViola in New York City. Lambert has been awarded fellowships for artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Lower East Side Printshop, Yaddo Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center. She has received press coverage and reviews from the Brooklyn Rail, the International New York Times, Art in America, and Hyperallergic.