Eleanor Ray

January 6 - February 10, 2019

Press Release

Nicelle Beauchene is pleased to announce Eleanor Ray’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Ray's small-scale paintings bring the viewer into an intimate conversation with landscapes and interiors, both ordinary and well known.

The paintings give form to a state of close attention, presenting specific places in series. Ray spends time with each location both in person and in memory, working from her drawings and photographs collected over time. Expansive views are contained on small surfaces, and succinct compositions become foundations for color, light, and space. Geometry materializes in the warmth of the visible world, as open horizons contrast with the rigid horizontals and verticals of architecture. Each painting is direct in its depiction of a nameable place, but subjective in scale and cropping, locating the viewer in a sense of place beyond an initial impression.

The oil on panel paintings assembled here can be grouped into four series: images of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty on the northeastern shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, depicted from varying vantage points and times of day; Italian interiors, with glimpses of frescoes by Fra Angelico and Giotto; Donald Judd’s concrete and mill aluminum works in Marfa, Texas; and open landscapes across the American West, particularly Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico. Focusing on locations both iconic and anonymous, Ray looks at the specific, yet unbounded, qualities of place, bringing distinct encounters into intuitive correspondence.

Eleanor Ray (b. 1987, Gainesville, FL) lives and works in New York. She received her undergraduate degree from Amherst and an MFA from the New York Studio School. She has recently shown her work with Howard’s in Athens, Georgia; The Landing in Los Angeles; Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects in New York; and in a solo exhibition, Works from the Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection at the University of Tulsa. Recent group shows include Marinaro Gallery, NY; Galerie Mikael Andersen, Copenhagen; Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm; and the Atlanta Contemporary. Numerous awards and residencies include Ucross Foundation, Wyoming; Edward F. Albee Foundation, NY; New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize.