Objects & Institutions

Gallery Luisotti is pleased to announce our new gallery exhibition, Shirley Irons: Objects & Institutions. Irons is exhibiting 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 opens on Thursday, April 1 and will run through 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.