Rachael Wren “Still It Grows”

Rick Wester Fine Art

This event has ended.

I almost always work in a square format. I know that some artists find the square confining, but for me it feels like the most expansive shape — it gives me the freedom to move equally in all directions throughout the painting. Using a square also emphasizes the geometry of each piece. The grid lines echo the square and return the viewer to the two-dimensional surface. The geometric and the organic are always in conversation as are the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional. Configuring the natural world to fit the artificial shape of the square highlights the idea that I am not reproducing the landscape but rather reinterpreting it to make my own constructions.

- Rachael Wren, 2021

If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.
- Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place

Rachael Wren’s premiere exhibition at the gallery, Still It Grows, explores the dichotomy between geometry and landscape, meticulous execution and rationality versus emotion and intuition, depicting space over location. Wren is particularly drawn to moments in nature in which form and space intermingle and are interchangeable.

Visualizing her canvases like the framework of a building, she utilizes geometry as the base for a sound structure, process and tool to layer and build upon. Using a square canvas provides symmetry and order to the work. She starts the work scheduling each placement along grid lines, which she leaves exposed. Wren views the framework of the grid lines as a “scaffolding” from where she improvises. Each line builds up multiple layers of shapes and colors that creates an ambiguous sphere of realism and abstraction and blurs the lines between the known and the unknown. The work is built up slowly, and Wren describes the clear amount of time spent with each line and layer as an “(invitation for) viewers to slow down in front of it too, the way one might stop and breathe deeper upon being in nature”.

There are moments in nature that blur the lines between individual elements – the sun shining through clouds, dusk or fog encompassing a bed of trees. Wren focuses on recreating these sequences in her ephemeral and atmospheric imagery.

The individual color schemes of each canvas play with the dissolving depiction of a realistic landscape. While works such as Thicket and Hindsight are filled with earth toned hues, the saturated oranges of Already There and soft lilacs of Vale question the viewer’s interpretation of the scene in front of them. While the mind attempts to make sense of the literal, the playful abstract overtakes the canvas. The only clear imagery is the painstaking process and emotions felt throughout the making of the work.

Wren is a Brooklyn-based artist and received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from the University of Washington. She has exhibited solo shows at Wave Hill, The String Room Gallery at Wells College, The Painting Center, Schema Projects, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Providence College. Her paintings have been included in group exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the National Academy Museum, Garis & Hahn, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Geoffrey Young Gallery, among others. Wren received the Julius Hallgarten Prize from the National Gallery Museum and an Alijira Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies at Emerson Landing, Chashama North, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Byrdcliffe Art Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Anderson Center, and the Artist House at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.