OHT Gallery Boston

Previous Exhibits

Wendy Edwards

Persistent Blooms

February 6 - March 7, 2009
Reception: Friday, February 6, 5:30 - 7:30pm

O·H+T Gallery is pleased to present Persistent Blooms, an exhibition of new work by Wendy Edwards. This exhibition marks an innovative phase in Edwards's work as she completes her transition from purely abstract to representational painting.

Wake Up (Flora and Fauna, OHT Gallery, June 2007) previewed Edwards's move away from abstraction with loopy daisies woven into an extruded net of paint. Citing her childhood doodles as a source, Edwards takes her new floral imagery in two directions. In Pinky, she begins with a painterly wash, over which she suspends two layers of net, one black, one white. Small black flowers adorn the net to suggest a veil from the type of hat worn with white gloves and a navy blue suit. As with much of Edwards's work, Pinky evokes a mood that hovers somewhere between buoyant and wistful, and we wonder if the hat was worn by someone dear to the artist.

In Edwards's second group of paintings, flowers triumph. Rose depicts a large, heavily painted rose breaking through a veil of dark green net, while Arrangement, a small still life reminiscent of Manet or Morandi, portrays a solitary, pink and white nosegay on a mossy green ground. In these lushly painted florals, Edwards's signature net is absent and bouquets occupy the shallow space in the center of the painting. This shift from patterned surface to painterly still life heightens the narrative content of Edwards's work. Though her floral themes are upbeat, the colors can be shadowy and moody, lending the works an "after the ball" poignancy.

Wendy Edwards lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island where she is a tenured professor in Painting at Brown University. She has exhibited her work widely in the U.S., and abroad. Recent exhibitions of her work include Couples Discourse, Palmer Museum, Pennsylvania State University, Obsession, Centre International D'art Contemporain du Pont-Aven, and Line Dancing, Islip Museum. She has been nominated for the Joan Mitchell Award in Painting and has received Salomon research grants from Brown University. This is her third one-person exhibition at O·H+T Gallery.