Deborah Dancy is an abstract artist. Her paintings and drawings are sensuous provocations beset with marks that guide, then abruptly collide into confrontational slabs of color. There is an atmosphere of complex but urgent tension in her work, as she builds tangential linear demarcations, and abutting shapes, that provoke, entice and disrupt; -taking us everywhere and nowhere. From densely painted forms to more minimally declared images, Dancy’s work operates in the recognition that meanderings, intentional and accidental declarations are best when the beautiful and the disconcerting exist simultaneously.

Deborah Dancy was born in Bessemer, Alabama and raised in Chicago, Illinois. She earned BFA from Illinois Wesleyan University and an MS and an MFA from Illinois State University. She is the recipient of John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Yaddo Fellow, and a National Endowment of the Arts NEFA award. Her work is in many collections including: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Birmingham Museum of Art, The Hunter Museum and The Detroit Institute of Art.  N’Namdi Contemporary Miami, Robischon Gallery, Denver, and Marcia Wood Gallery, Atlanta, represent her work. 

I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, spooky.
— Anne Carson




I work abstractly because I am interested in its ability to operate in a realm in which beauty and tension simultaneously exist without explanation or narrative. It’s my intention to create ambiguous spaces that aim to be both beautiful and unnerving. In this realm of the incomplete, the fragment, the ruin and residue of - “almost was” and “might become,” I work between the edges of struggle and discovery. I take pleasure in moving paint around until something holds my interest and interrupt any assumptions about what it should become. Through a series of processes involving scraping away and repainting, fragmented tangled structures, patched and disjointed emerge to organize themselves in ambiguous spaces. I want to honor the process and have the exposed forms resist location by existing in tangential space.