RWFA is pleased to present:

Mary SHAH: Sunbird

As I began working this morning, I thought how I’ve long believed that trees were once dancers now memorialized in elegant poses. I further mused that dancers were once birds and birds were once a song, and all together, we are breathing.

- Mary Shah, 2023

Please join us this Thursday, February 22 at 6 pm for the opening of Mary Shah's fifth solo exhibition at RWFA, Sunbird, comprised of recent oil on panel paintings and watercolors. Shah continues to explore ethereal, atmospheric compositions informed by her fascination with natural forms, her devotion to music as inspiration and her indulgence in modern and contemporary poetry, particularly the writings of Sean Danson. Her idiosyncratic melding of non-visual influences results in imagery that may or may not be drawn from the visual world but most certainly aims to cross over into dream states. Her last exhibition in the fall of 2022, Dream Opera, was a definitive synopsis of those forces driving her artistic practice. Sunbird, part of the title of her recent diptych, To Bathe in a Petal and Sleep in the Sky (Sunbird), hints at the abstraction of avian forms that has permeated her work since 2020. The allusions to flight, to waves, to the wind are no accident, serving as metaphorical references to the painter’s inner states of mind when painting.

Shah has worked in watercolor for several years. Beginning in 2019 her method was to test the limits of transparency and color bleeding. Several paintings and watercolors in the winter 2020 exhibition, Letters from the Afternoon, reflected this pursuit. Four years later, Sunbird displays the fruits of her dedication, melding the near nothingness of forms with the softness of her lines as in To Bathe in a Petal…, while brashly contrasting pastels with fields of saturated earth tones in works such as Starlings (Jewel Street), Lucid Dreaming at the End of the World (inspired by Danson’s book of poetry of the same title) and the masterful Theater of Air. Together with Mint in the Mind, both 36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 cm) Shah shows how she successfully scales up her technique from her 12 x 16 inch watercolors while retaining the intimacy, freedom of line and immediacy of the former.

Recently, Shah teamed up with the saxophonist and educator Tim Armacost (The Jazz Saxophone Book, Sher Music, 2023; The Inevitable Note, TMA Records, 2023) when they discovered both experienced synesthesia, the condition of experiencing sensory stimulation resulting in involuntary stimulus in another sense or in various forms. Armacost invited her to paint while he performed with his quartet at the Greenwich Village jazz club, Small’s which resulted in a number of watercolors, suggesting what colors he saw with different musical notes.

Professionally one of the few artists to successfully labor in the art market as a gallerist, Shah has also contributed to RWFA’s exhibition program as a co-curator with Rick Wester on the group exhibitions, Invincible Summer, (2024), Love, Devotion, Surrender, Dedication (2021) and Circles and Squares (2019).