Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Helen Miranda Wilson. This is the artist's third solo show at the gallery.
This exhibition consists of eight small paintings made in 2011 and 2012. As with much of Wilson's previous work, they use a vocabulary of variations within patterns of repeating shapes.
The liveliness that results from her freehand application of paint references the natural world and adds an organic quality to these paintings in which geometric icons are arrayed over fields of shifting color.
They resemble and are inspired in part by the sparkling patterns of hand-sewn quilts, softened by use, the often inexact repetitions found in primitive textiles like Kuba clothes, woven in raffia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Cuneiform, an ancient script which exists on the cusp of pictographs and letters, written with symbols as delicate as birdsong or the tracks of animals in wet earth.
Many years of painting and drawing from direct observation as well as the artist's early exposure to the art and design of the Bauhaus movement have greatly influenced her work.
Although Wilson no longer uses recognizable subject matter as she did for much of her career, these paintings are done with the same materials and techniques and in the same small format for which she has always been known. The surfaces are open, left unvarnished. They have a contiguous, skin-like quality due to the artist's use of oil paint with no added medium.
After living for decades in New York City, Wilson now makes her home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. She works as a public servant in the town's municipal government and maintains a small scale farm. She has kept honeybees and chickens successfully for many years. She paints full-time and teaches occasionally.
Helen Miranda Wilson: Kuba Cuneiform Quilts will be on view from today, November 13 - December 20, 2014. An opening reception will be held tonight, November 13th from 6-8 pm. A full-color catalog is available. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the Joseph Bunge at (212) 750-0949 or by email at joseph@loribooksteinfineart.com.
Photo Credit: Helen Miranda Wilson, Light Garden, 2012, Oil on panel, 8 x 8 inches
