ARTIST STATEMENT
My paintings combine elements of landscape and geometry, evoking nature’s space, light, and atmosphere within a gridded structure. In my work, hints of landscape emerge and then dissolve into layers of subtly shifting color and mark. Small, discrete brushstrokes accumulate into dense, shimmering spaces. They hover and vibrate between the crisp lines of an anchoring grid, an interplay that suggests the universal duality between structure and randomness, order and chaos, the known and the unknown.
My paintings are places the viewer can enter into with both mind and body. They have a breathing quality, a quiet vibration created by the push and pull of mark and color. Each painting is built up slowly, with many layers, and that time embedded in the work invites viewers to slow down in front of it too, the way one might stop and breathe deeper upon being in nature.
This work grows out of a deep connection to important places in my life — usually natural spaces that I’ve returned to over months and years. The longer I spend in a place, the more it acts on me. I become aware of subtle changes in color, density, and atmosphere from season to season and year to year. These observations and memories of places I’ve spent time in are the catalysts for my paintings. I think back to them as I use the language of abstraction to capture the physical and emotional sensations of being in nature. In the paintings, the internal, emotional landscapes and the external, physical ones come together — and place becomes home.
BIO
Rachael Wren is a Brooklyn, NY based painter whose atmospheric abstractions have their source in both landscape and memory. Rachael received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from the University of Washington. She believes that the dense, ever-present atmosphere of Seattle that she experienced during graduate school seeped into her, and still informs her paintings.
Rachael has had solo shows at Rick Wester Fine Art, The Shirley Project Space, Wave Hill, The String Room Gallery at Wells College, The Painting Center, Schema Projects, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Providence College. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the National Academy Museum, Garis & Hahn, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Geoffrey Young Gallery, and Trestle Gallery, among many others. Rachael is the recipient of the Julius Hallgarten Prize from the National Academy Museum, an Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, and an Aljira Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies at Kingsbrae International Residence for the Arts, Saltonstall Foundation, Byrdcliffe Colony, Emerson Landing, Chashama North, the Vermont Studio Center, the Anderson Center, and the Artist House at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
