Laurie Nye “Earth Flowers”
Laurie Nye’s radiant, psychedelic oil on linen paintings are characterized by her interests in color, symbolism, and painterliness. Her brilliant palette, as Jane McFadden writing in Artforum asserts, “refuses any adherence to reality and brings to mind Fauvism’s reconfiguration of painting’s relationship to color.” The show takes places on the third floor and is on view concurrently with an exhibition of canvasses on the second floor by Los Angeles artist Joshua Nathanson.
A prolific painter (b. 1972), Nye trained in figurative drawing and painting at Memphis College of Art and earned a Master of Fine Arts California Institute of the Arts. She typically works on multiple large-scale canvases at once and during the pandemic began retreating to her family's quiet, verdant Tennessee home. The result is a body of smaller works produced slowly and one at a time on an easel in her mother’s kitchenette. The highly activated, dynamic abstractions, mostly 24 by 20 or 28 by 22 inches, are affecting for the artist’s vivid brushwork and concentrated use of color and line.
At a young age Nye was encouraged to cultivate her love of freedom, imagination, and nature; and she confesses a fascination with flowers, “dealing with flowers and reconstructing them and getting the essence,” especially irises. Purple Iris (2022) demonstrates Nye’s deeply felt feeling for the flora, as does Spring Flowers with Moon (2020), which evinces both her deft use of line to break up the picture plane and ability overall to create a sense of painterly space. Sunflower with Birds in Lucy (2022), the largest in the exhibition, glows and radiates and suggests a mythology or science fiction. Taken together, Nye's sublime depictions of the natural world are a place of self-discovery, connection, and celebration.
Press release and images via Van Doren Waxter, NYC.
