Eleanor Ray
August 26th-October 6th, 2018
Wyoming Solstice, oil on panel, 6.25 x 8 in, 2018
Howard’s is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by Eleanor Ray. The show will run from August 26th to October 6th. The opening reception will be Sunday, August 26th, from 3-6pm.
Eleanor Ray’s small paintings depict locations she has recently visited, and possess a sensitivity to place and memory. This group includes American landscapes of Wyoming, Texas, and New Mexico. Expansive skies, clear summer light, and the subtle curvature of landforms are carefully framed alongside architectural structures. Viewers peer into the distance through the lines of windows, and shadows fall with a precise geometry. We are drawn into a stylized world that is both intimate and grand, rich with ambiguity.
Her sparse pictures hold a meditative observational stillness, and the absence of figures heightens our existential connection to natural and manmade spaces. They blend an objective clarity with subjective experience and delicate touch. There is a cool poetry to her cropping, visual rhythms, and succinct delivery of paint. Framing within the pictures seems to echo the edges of her panels, recalling the lens of modern photography or cinema. The suspended sense of time and the slowness of the images' unfolding give hints of filmmakers like Chantal Akerman or Michelangelo Antonioni. Her connection to the history of painting is refreshingly unironic. She is the descendant of artists as varied as Edward Hopper, Giorgio Morandi, Jane Freilicher, Donald Judd, and Ad Reinhardt. Her modest directness only emphasizes the openness of her paintings; they tell us nothing and everything simultaneously.
Eleanor Ray lives and works in New York and is originally from Gainesville, Florida. She received her undergraduate degree from Amherst and an MFA from the New York Studio School. She has a forthcoming solo show with Nicelle Beauchene in New York in January, 2019. She has recently shown her work with The Landing in Los Angeles and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in New York, and in a solo exhibition, Works from the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection at the Univerity of Tulsa. Recent group shows include Marinaro Gallery, NY; Galerie Mikael Anderson, Copenhagen; Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm; and the Atlanta Contemporary. Her work has recently been reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, Modern Painters, and the New Republic; and Jerry Saltz included Ray’s exhibition in his list of the Ten Best Art Shows of 2013 in New York Magazine. Numerous awards and residencies include Ucross Foundation, Wyoming; Edward F. Albee Foundation, NY; New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize.
Please contact info@howardsartgallery.com with any questions.
