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Artist Reception: April 1, 6-8pm
Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition Shirley Irons: Objects & Institutions. In the gallery, Irons will exhibit a series of recent paintings derived from seemingly innocuous spaces and urban atmospheres, seemingly rendered into a false prosaic. Gesturing both towards the ideas of abstraction and representation, the works move between the quotidian and the seductively opaque, at once inviting and challenging the interpretation of her tableaus. The show will open on Thursday, April 1 until May 15, 2010
Seemingly drawing on the language of still lives and documentation, Irons’ paintings often find their well-source from photographic materials. Like the deadpan mimesis of a throwaway snapshot, the focus of her paintings often describe unremarkable elements of the every day, as we blindly learn to forget them. Chairs, doors, and plants reside in the plaintive silence of empty offices and building hallways, devoid of the human presence. Dispersed through various paintings are contours of colors that impel the appearance of abstract painting, though this too is transient, and affords a bare minimum of information. Tempering the impulse towards the epic and the auratic through use of simple monochromatic tones over emotionally oblique interiors, in these paintings, Irons’ brushstrokes are only loosely held in check by the rigid geometries of the spaces’ design, inferring a human gesture; what appears mundane and unveils the emotive value underneath the paintings’ immediate remove. Irons paintings are conduits to retrospection, leading the viewer into a climate of both transience and anxiety, of witnessing the wholly familiar and anonymous, and the experience of remembering such: what we do with things we don’t know to forget. The soft render of Irons’ palette limns the institutional coldness of buildings with this basic need to see ourselves as relevant in our time, if only through the lens of approximated memories.
Irons’ exhibition, A Perfect Day, recently closed at the Stainar Gallery at the Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. She is currently an instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York. For more information about the artist and the exhibition, or for a complete curriculum vitae of the artist, please contact Gallery Luisotti at (310) 453-0043 or by email at info@galleryluisotti.com.
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