Shelly Malkin “Clouds in My Karma”

Graham Shay 1857

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Graham Shay 1857 presents our new fall exhibition Clouds in My Karma, featuring recent paintings by the contemporary artist Shelly Malkin.

Amongst many things, Shelly Malkin is an environmentalist and has worked on behalf of numerous
environmental causes, including the New York Restoration Project and the Natural Resources
Defense Council. She is also an avid outdoors woman with a passion for skiing and rock climbing
that has taken her all over the world. The natural landscapes that she experiences on her
adventures often provide an almost divine inspiration for her paintings; her large-scale watercolors
sensitively combine mica and iridescent pigments to create sweeping panoramas that are
simultaneously intimate and vast.

In her past exhibits, accompanying each body of Shelly’s work, has been a series of small intimate
subjects, an accent to the main body of work. The current exhibition is primarily based on this set of
small works, the series here is clouds. None are specific representations, but instead are drawn from
the artist’s memory catalogue of sights seen over a life spent in the open air. Each painting evokes
a sense of nostalgia, examining the collective human relationship with nature by opting to portray an
idea rather than a true-to-life depiction. As she says, “I don’t plan each piece beforehand, and I don’t
really know what will be the end result, but the journey is exciting.”

Shelly Malkin grew up in New York City and attended the Dalton School. She graduated from
Princeton University with a degree in Art History and a minor in European Cultural Studies, and went
on to teach at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York.

She studied painting at the School of Visual Arts and the National Academy of Design under Serge
Hollerbach in New York City, and at the Silvermine Arts Center and the Renaissance Workshop of
Dmitri Wright in Connecticut. She is a member of the Advisory Council of the Princeton University Art
Museum.

Malkin has participated in group shows at the National Academy of Design and at the Greenwich Art
Society and has had a number of solo shows at Arcadia Gallery in Old Greenwich and at the
Audubon Gallery. Her first New York solo show opened at the Graham Gallery on April 14th, 2013,
followed by a second one in April, 2017. Her forthcoming exhibition: Shelly Malkin: Clouds in My
Karma, is scheduled at GRAHAM SHAY 1857, October 6th through October 23rd , 2021.