For her fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, Rick Wester Fine Art is pleased to present recent oil on panel paintings and watercolors by Mary Shah dating from the past two years that feature an evolution in approach, with a decidedly consistent theme of forms, color, space and light inspired by nature, dreams and music. Over the course of the past several years her work has evolved from atmospheric explorations of emotional metaphors and impressionistic land- and seascapes into compositions exploiting the connectivity inherent in her diptych panels to create lyrically transient spaces, sometimes light and airy and at others, dense and packed – a terrain ranging from the highest mountains to the deepest forests.

A result of intensely focused studio work following months of isolation due to the pandemic, Shah was generously hosted by the New York painter Jill Moser in her studio, emerging a changed artist. Shah is still channeling her own personal interpretation of life’s events into her paintings, but where her recent work focused on the ethereal, the new work delves into motifs of bird-like bodies, imaginary sea waves and other definitive natural forms but still with mystical results. On the exhibition’s title, Dream Opera, she has stated, “Dream Opera” came to me in anticipation of my first work session in the new studio. I saw the quinacridone violet forms hovering with the orangey gold forms in a kind of airborne symphony. It was a celebration of freedom, a picture of what the gift of space and time looked like… also a picture of release and return to myself. Painting is like breathing and the lack of it in my life resulted in a metaphorical, shallow and labored breath for months.

Shah’s paintings reveal a multivalent mind. As an artist, she creates images borne of the intersecting vectors of influences she seeks out in literature, music, poetry and other painters’ works from all eras. A graduate of the Pratt Institute, she worked as a director of Lennon, Weinberg and is currently at Alexandre Gallery. These affiliations have afforded her an intimate access to the studios and art of dozens of noted artists of our time. With each exhibition at RWFA, Shah has presented bodies of work that reflect an extended interior meditation on the world about her, drawing upon the influences of the loss of her brother as well as the birth of her son, profoundly authentic sources resulting in an idiosyncratic vocabulary all her own. Writing further on the nature of this current body of work, she says, A theme that is woven through this new body of work is that of dreams and longing— if we are the architects of what our lives amount to, the paintings are blueprints, imagining what the future could look and feel like— encompassing the melancholy past into the scaffolding of a fluid, swirling, beautiful present and future; a ‘Dream Opera’ where each painting is a song in a breathtaking production of this life on this plane during this time. 

The artist gratefully dedicates the exhibition to Jill Moser in recognition of her support and friendship.