By good oranges and moody shades of blue, Los Angeles-based artist Roberta Gentry renders vivid, balanced compositions that, as she says, take the senses critically. Gentry has lengthy been within the relationship between the constructed and the pure, cultivating summary, biomorphic types scaffolded by tall columns.
Gravitating towards symmetry and restricted palettes, Gentry paints rhythmic items that adhere to an underlying grid. Each portray is the results of a number of layers of thinned acrylic, which construct into delicate gradients that dissipate throughout the canvas.
The work proven listed here are a part of that artist’s upcoming solo exhibition, Blood Orange. Lush with shade and texture, Gentry’s items reference the Sixteenth-century La Dame à la licorne tapestries, comprised of six fiber works that includes a blond, lavishly dressed noblewoman flanked by a unicorn on one facet and a lion on the opposite. Every bit correlates with one of many 5 senses, with textual content on the sixth studying “À Mon Seul Désirm,” or “to my solely need.”
Whereas Blood Orange references the tapestries’ daring shade palettes, Gentry additionally renders numerous components they depict. The velvet robe the noblewoman wears, a towering pipe organ, and the orange timber anchoring the backdrop turn out to be central types.
Though students interpret the tapestries as straight referencing the sense, others take a broader, extra nuanced approached. The latter posit that the fiber works communicate to how we collect information and details about the world—significantly by means of the sixth, extra mysterious piece associated to emotion—and that is one other place the place Gentry’s pursuits align. She usually considers “how we assemble mythologies to interpret and clarify our lived experiences,” that emerges on the canvas by means of a stress between the order of the grid and the roving, unpredictable nature of natural development.
Blood Orange runs by means of October 24 at Observe 16’s East Hollywood location. Discover extra from the artist on Instagram.
