Eleanor Ray

October 10 - November 16, 2024

Eleanor Ray

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present our third solo exhibition of new oil paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Eleanor Ray.

“I’m drawn to places where you can see farther, where a sense of geologic time is visible, and where there’s some structure that lends itself to painting…something that feels whole as an image and surface rather than a fragment or snapshot.”

—Eleanor Ray

Quietly refining a dialogue between painterly representation and realism, Eleanor Ray explores memory and its evocation through her intimate landscapes. Informed by her own drawings, photographs, and memory of time spent in each particular place, Ray’s deliberate yet improvisational compositions continue to evolve long after she departs from their origins. Distinct from a plein air painting practice, her work considers the way distance and time inflect an experience of place.

The enduring pull and quiet calm of vistas, seascapes, and architectural thresholds appear across multiple panels. The paintings’ internal scale embraces a paradox of the visible: a distant view contains much that remains unseen, with the life specific to each ecosystem often appearing only on an approach closer than the paintings depict. Light and space become primary players, balancing distant stretches of land and open expanses of water and coastline. In Dry Tortugas, April, the ocean panorama materializes as broad color fields in gentle brushstrokes, while another view of this seascape, also titled Dry Tortugas, April, reveals vividly bright daylight across a stretch of water. Beyond a first impression, Ray’s compositions expand as portable encounters of light, atmosphere, and place.

Eleanor Ray (b. 1987, Gainesville, FL) studied painting at Amherst College and the New York Studio School. Her work has been supported by residencies at the Montello Foundation, Yaddo, Ucross, Jentel, and the BAU Institute, among others, as well as a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize. Recent solo and two-person presentations of her work include the Wilson Museum at Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia (2021); Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York (2021, 2019); Howard’s, Athens, Georgia (2018); University of Tulsa, Oklahoma (2017); The Landing, Los Angeles, California (2016); and Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, New York (2015, 2014). Ray’s work can be found in the public collections of the Pensacola Museum of Art at the University of West Florida; Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University, Roanoke, VA; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.