Josette Urso
Artist Statement
Josette Urso makes paintings, drawings and collages working directly and urgently in response to her immediate environment. For Urso, space is a malleable substance that she delights in manipulating acrobatically in a kind of gymnasium of mark making and image collision all governed by intuitive leaps of scale, color, and a wayward geometry. Her approach involves “moment-to-moment” extrapolation where the contrasts and cross-fertilizations are cumulative, non-linear, free flowing and interpretive. She strives to discover and engage the known as well as the unknown in unforeseen ways.
Urso has shown widely in the United States and abroad in galleries, public institutions, and museums including the New York Public Library, the Drawing Center, and the Bronx Museum for the Arts. She has had numerous grants and residencies including those from the NEA, Basil H. Alkazzi and the Gottlieb and Pollock-Krasner Foundations as well as the Camargo Foundation, Ucross and Yaddo.