Barbara Prey Projects announces Still Light August 1 – September 4 an exhibition of Barbara Prey’s new monumental watercolours which push the medium in new directions and size, continuing the investigation between reality and imagination.
Photos – courtesy of Barbara Prey Projects ©
The artist’s innovative eye for the American landscape has placed her paintings in the private collections of U.S. Presidents and dignitaries, business titans, European Royalty, celebrities including Orlando Bloom and Tom Hanks, as well as the prominent public collections of The National Gallery of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Kennedy Space Center and the permanent collection of The White House, where she is one of two living female artists represented, among many other institutions. Commissioned by NASA (the only female commissioned four times), she was recently commissioned by the contemporary art museum MASS MoCA to paint the largest watercolour in the world for their new building currently on long-term exhibition at the museum. PBS referred to the MASS MoCA commissioned artists as “global leaders in contemporary art”. Prey was appointed by the President of the United States to the National Council on the Arts, the advisory board to the National Endowment for the Arts. Artists are appointed for their contributions and recognition in American Art.
‘Gatekeeper,’ watercolor on paper 40×60 inches. Part of the Nocturne Series ©
Prey’s highly original approach to painting has challenged conventional understandings of the genre. She steers her way between realism and abstraction, painterliness and reduction, perception and synthesis. She references art history but transcends and creates a contemporary view with her unmistakable voice, establishing within the trajectory of American Art a 21st-century female lens. As an artist working often en plein air, environmental issues and climate change are concerns that inform her paintings. Her layered, luminous, and nuanced paintings also speak to issues of gender, climate and ecology, and spiritual wonder. Prey’s practice evokes the seemingly every day to push the boundaries of what the medium of watercolour can do.
