Alexandra Pacula “Vertical City”

Gallery Henoch

[Image: Alexandra Pacula "Temporal Growth" Oil on Canvas, 54 x 40 in.]

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Polish-born, New York-based artist Alexandra Pacula (b. 1979) paints works investigating a world of visual intoxication and wondrous disorientation. As the title, Vertical City, suggests, the grandeur of Manhattan’s shimmering towers are on full display in 12 large-scale paintings that capture the city at night.

In each picture, Pacula confronts the viewer with a wall of skyscrapers so vast they appear to extend beyond the canvas. Powered by columns of glowing windows, the multitude of soaring buildings projects the vigor of a thriving society and the enchantment of a restless metropolis. The cacophony of lights, represented throughout her canvases by elegant dashes and dots, stimulate multiple shifts of the viewer’s eye, rhythmically articulating the feel of a city captured in a fleeting moment. This singular visual energy is intensified through the exuberant placement of pulsating marks and glazes of brilliant color. Surely Pacula is inviting us to share in the mood of her city.

Pacula’s work has been exhibited throughout the United States as well as Russia, Spain, London, and Paris. In 2010, she was the recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Painting Fellowship, as well as a one-year residency at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, sponsored by the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. In 2008 Pacula won the Saatchi Showdown Competition. She received her BFA from Rutgers in 2002 & her MFA at Montclair State University in 2006.