Shirley Irons, Composition: Landscapes, Highways and Flowers

January 17 – March 8, 2025

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  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-01
  • Winter Daffys_ 2003 _14x18in_Photograph.
  • SI_Simple Landscape (Ochre)_2003_11x14in
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-07
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-05
  • IRO0092
  • IRO0091
  • SI_Rails_2005_27.5×40.5in
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-06
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-13
  • SI_Airfield_2008_12x12in
  • SI_Hemlocks, Far_2019_38x50in
  • Queen Anne’s Lace Bouquet_2014_12x16in
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-04
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-15
  • IRO0109
  • IRO0110
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-09
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-11
  • Still Life (Two Extended Zinnias)_2014_10x20in
  • SI_Pink Carnation (with White Rose and Mum)_2023_18x14in
  • SI_Zinnia (After Redon)_2021_12x9in
  • SI_First-Tulips
  • SI_5 Clementines_2020_5x7in
  • SI_Scabiosa_2024_8x6in
  • SI_Quick-Blue-Glass_2022
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-10
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-16
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-12
  • Ceiling Fan_2009_ 27x33in
  • Access Key_2024_ 5x7in
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-18
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-17
  • French Tulips_2023 _16x20in
  • SI_Tropical Container_1995_9x12in
  • SI_Meadowland (Fence)_1996_16x20in
  • Dilapidated Zinnias_ 2024_4x4in
  • 2 Dead Peonies_2020_10x8in
  • Peonies_2014_12x9in
  • Morandi’s Radiator, 2015_12x9in
  • LUISOTTI-IRONS-INSTALL-02

Shirley Irons, Composition: Landscapes, Highways and Flowers

January 17 – March 8, 2025

“I’m interested in how we read images, how little is enough to be legible, how reflections can act as light and memory. By using paint, I can give those side-glances a moment of slow attention. By using photography, I can capture them.”  –  Shirley Irons

Gallery Luisotti is delighted to announce our fourth solo exhibition with New York-based artist Shirley Irons. This exhibition celebrates the release of her first comprehensive publication, Composition, and showcases four-decades of work mixing her industrial landscapes and anonymous highways with her most recent focus, the flower.

Irons’ subtle oil paintings, made between 1988 and 2019, of landscape fragments and urban interiors based on photographs taken as she drives through urban spaces, blends realistic details with abstract applications of paint to explore how much information is necessary to render an image legible. These fleeting landscape scenes, often capturing the perspective of someone on the move, gives meditative attention to side-glances and everyday objects. Influenced by late Manet, Morris Graves, Janice Biala and particularly Vija Celmins, she extracts moments in the landscape and creates a simple, nuanced rendition of a lamp or a tiny section of the ocean or sky, fleeting moments of infinity.

The flower paintings represent a paradigmatic shift in Irons’ style, transitioning from using photographs as references to deriving paintings directly from observation. As such, these new paintings consider a different way of seeing, reinforced by a salon-style hang where the movement of one’s eye across the canvases parallels the motion of the artist’s hand across the canvas. Moments of heartfelt consideration, visual pleasure, or poignant passages echo Irons’ paint handling—the tenuous strokes of pale green that portray a fragile stem, the bristly pointillism of the flower’s luminescent fronds, and the subtly monochromatic shading of the flowers themselves—meditating on the passage of time and the joys of close looking.

By highlighting these in-between moments and spaces the artist expands how we think about the world around us, eloquently capturing the fragmentation of modern life and the ephemeral nature of our existence with elegant pulses of painterly movement through time and space.

Please join us on Saturday, February 1st, 5 – 7pm to celebrate the artists new exhibition and book launch. Composition is published by MACK Books, UK.

Shirley Irons
Composition (MACK)