Richard Heller Gallery to feature Rachell Sumpter ~ 'Molten Kin'

Thursday, 29 January 2009 21:14

 

Santa Monica, CA - Richard Heller Gallery is proud to present the second Los Angeles solo exhibition by west coast artist Rachell Sumpter. In her latest works, Sumpter paints a desolate yet peopled wilderness. Using layered gouache and pastel, these are scenes at once of community and of isolation. Figures stand in heavy,embroidered clothing, hidden and yet seen in procession, in ceremony or in witness to wonderment.  On view February 21 – March 21, 2009.

There are melting mountaintops and campfires, ghosts and graves; vast monuments and tiny moments that speak to the legacies a generation leaves, to the promises it makes. Sumpter borrows imagery from religious and political traditions, from dreams and from our threatened natural world. And yet amid these artifacts, memories and future relics, there is a human closeness, a physical intimacy. This spirit, and the dazzles of color that extend often to paper's edge, lend an optimism to what might otherwise seem an elegy. In this bleak and changing landscape there are celebrations as well as lamentations, and with deceptively simple strokes she creates an iconography for the longed for and the feared: a mythology of mystery, pleasure, and the foreshadowing of loss.

Rachell Sumpter was born in Los Angeles, CA in 1972. She currently lives and works between Sacramento, CA and Waldron Island, WA. Other exhibitions have included “Fern Whips”, Allston- Skirt Gallery, Boston, MA (project) 2007, “Tenderly”, Sunday Gallery L.E.S., New York, NY 2008, and “The Happening”, Orange County Museum of Art, CA 2007.

RICHARD HELLER GALLERY - 2525 Michigan Ave. B-5A - Santa Monica, CA 90404
T 310.453.9191 F 310.453.2791 / www.richardhellergallery.com

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