Georgia Marsh “Arc Paintings”

Senior & Shopmaker Gallery

[Image: Georgia Marsh "Arc VI: Double Pitch" (2017) oil and graphite on Duralar mounted on Plexiglas, 42 x 60 in.]

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Senior & Shopmaker presents Arc Paintings, an exhibition of recent work by New York-based artist Georgia Marsh. In this new body of work, she continues to advance the tradition of still life painting and more specifically, the rich history of representations of flora in art. Marsh, who began her career in the early 1970s in Paris and New York, arrived at landscape painting through the prevailing language of minimalist abstraction. The tension between representation and abstraction, and the organic and the geometric, have been enduring themes in her drawings, paintings, and prints.

The Arc Paintings consist of seductively rendered flowers and plant forms painted on a translucent polyester film called Duralar, and mounted to a clear Lexan “canvas”— a coolly mechanical white surface suggestive of the screen of a digital device. To further distance her floral subject matter from verisimilitude, Marsh crops and contains her images between curvilinear borders and sharply defined shapes filled with opaque fields of color, removing the flowers and branches from any suggestion of the real landscape. This truncated, interrupted vision of nature serves to break down any narrative possibility and to underscore the tension between artifice and reality.

The acuity of Marsh’s vision is reflected in the finely differentiated and complex forms of her floral subjects, meticulously observed and painted. Influenced by sources such as Chinese scroll painting, 18th century wallpaper panels, textiles, and other forms of decorative arts, the artist draws upon the ubiquity of floral depictions across the arc of cultural traditions. By imposing a formal structure over the unruliness of nature, she elevates traditional still life from the illustrative and mimetic and forces a rereading of the genre.

In recent years, Marsh’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI; the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ; and the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Her work is found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Musee Nationale d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and the Cleveland Art Museum, Cleveland, OH, among others.