Shirley Irons, Composition: Landscapes, Highways and Flowers

“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.

Shirley Irons
Composition (MACK)