Barbara Grad Showcase

Barbara Grad

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EVOCATIONS OF LIGHT

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Barbara Grad EVOCATIONS OF LIGHT

Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com cover: Red Rocks, 2014-17, oil on linen, 56 x 48 inches

BARBARA GRAD LewAllen Galleries is pleased to present this showcase of works by Barbara Grad offering a different approach to landscape painting that conveys a sense of entropy resonating the change and disequilibrium that characterizes contemporary times.

These works present a new, perhaps radically new, kind of landscape painting as a visually imagined experience where observation is vigorously reinterpreted aesthetically. It is as though Grad reconceptualizes planes of existence and presents them in her paintings as ideas of what the observed and imagined experience of a place might look like simultaneously.

The work is comprised of a confluence of forms and shapes derived from Grad’s being in landscape that are disconnected in Grad’s imagination and reconceptualized in placement on her canvases.

These are reassembled and supercharged with eye-popping colors. Underlying each work is an undulating energy, shaking the forms and disrupting their stasis, rattling conventional ideas of the durability of the land, and awakening an awareness in the viewer that in these works a sense of change abounds. All of this prompts from the viewer a challenging rethinking of landscape.

Maybe there is a warning here of the effects of climate change, or the impact of excessive human intervention on the land. Maybe there is more broadly a metaphor of the chaos and confusion that abounds in the world. Yet in these works, gorgeous colors interplay with intriguing shapes and forms juxtaposed and assembled in what seem like marvelously resolved puzzle-like pictures that are neither of fully recognizable imagery nor are they completely abstracted. In comparing this facture of Grad’s work with that of the abstract landscapes of Richard Diebenkorn, the art writer and critic John Yau noted “What links Grad to Diebenkorn is her ability to establish a continuous tension between the paintings’ distinctly defined sections and the overall image.” This tension radiates throughout Grad’s work and confers upon it a coruscating vivacity.

As the fragments of Grad’s fractured landscapes come together there is retained an engaging sense of mystery but, in its midst, there also emerges an evocation of light, a suggestion of brightness in a jumbled world, perhaps to signal a redemptive sense of hope. Irrespective of any deeper meanings, the paintings of Barbara Grad are refreshing and beautiful new takes on the idea of landscape and a new way of looking at the physical environment around us.

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Meteor Nights, 2017 oil on linen, 54 x 60 inches

Swim Home, 2019-2020 oil on linen, 72 x 60 inches

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Defrost, 2021 oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches

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Echo Bridge, 2021 oil on linen, 30 x 46 inches

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Echo, 2018-2020 oil on linen, 59.75 x 72 inches

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How Many Roads, 2021 oil on linen, 24 x 30 inches

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Lion's Den, 2017 oil on linen, 59.88 x 72 inches

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Round About, 2016, oil on linen, 48 x 50 inches

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Photography Courtesy Barbara Grad

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Born in Chicago, Barbara Grad received both her BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For many years she continued to be an active member of Chicago’s contemporary art scene as a founding member of the Artemisia Gallery. An accomplished artist and distinguished educator, Grad is a Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Recent solo exhibitions include The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO, and the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham, MA. Her work is in the collections of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Danforth Museum of Art, Fidelity Investments, and Wellington Management.

Grad’s many honors include two fellowships from the Art Institute of Chicago, and individual artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Massachusetts Foundation and Cultural Council Grants. She was a resident artist at the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland and later at the Jentel Artist Residency in Wyoming.

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | contact@lewallengalleries.com © 2022 LewAllen Contemporary, LLC 20 Artwork © Barbara Grad