RWFA IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE REPRESENTATION OF REGINA DELUISE

Regina DeLuise employs 19th century materials and processes to elevate and transform the contemporary quotidian into images of humble magnificence…Her work is never nostalgic; it recognizes and reveals the present moment as if bathed in the light and atmosphere of grace. Her images are quiet prayers of gratitude. 

-        Mark Alice Durant, Publisher and Editor, Saint Lucy Books

I remain intrigued by the alchemy and mystery of the photograph; its description of a sentience, the passage of time, and a universal sense of what each of us crave. In this time of tumult and displacement, I’m looking closely at an essential foundation, a core experience which amplifies something we all share.

-        Regina DeLuise, 2022

Opening the fall season at RWFA is the gallery's inaugural exhibition of photographs by veteran photographer and educator, Regina DeLuise - her first solo exhibition in New York in nearly twenty years. In the stable of the late, venerable photography dealer Bonni Benrubi for two decades, Ms. DeLuise exhibited throughout the United States, and internationally, starting in the 1980s. The Brooklyn-born photographer employs a streamlined and simple, time-tested method to produce extraordinary work, at once elemental and transcendent ineffable, and yet strikingly tangible.

Rick Wester is pleased to also announce the representation of Ms. DeLuise in the United States. On the agreement, he states, "Regina and I came up through the photography world at the same time very early in our careers. She was represented by Bonni Benrubi whom I had met while working for Daniel Wolf after graduation in 1979 and we just always had a connection based on pictures and the excitement of seeing the medium flourish as a collecting area. It was a truly thrilling era in New York.”

Embracing a canonical process barely altered since the nineteenth century, DeLuise’s process is as reductive as it is lush, choosing to photograph with a large-format view camera, through which she coaxes nuanced tonality with hand-coated platinum/palladium contact prints from 8 x 10 inch negatives. Her practice for decades has been decidedly straightforward and unpretentious. Despite that she still aims for, and yields, a hauntingly fresh and contemporary sense of mystery and complexity. DeLuise accepts and celebrates the influences of Modernist masters of the medium such as Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and Tina Modotti, but ultimately is fully concerned with being immediately relevant to the present. She fills voids of desire for content and craft with a torrent of visual relationships in the world with a camera vision unabashedly oriented to now.

Her landscapes quietly exude the peaceful calm of luxuriating in the sun of Italy, the home of her familial roots. She looks at the ancient, not with nostalgia but with a sense of belonging. Her portraits and figurative studies create volume, and not reducing her sitters to just two dimensions. Her portraits exist as easily as breathing, with the certitude of corporal fact. The interiors and still life studies are jigsaw puzzles cut from light and space. If reassembled they would stand as a protective shelter of many rooms decorated with the reflections of a life lived in love with the world.

Her work is held in numerous prestigious museum, institutional and private collections. These include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, Kansas. She is also the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and residencies, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. DeLuise has traveled around the globe, producing work in collaboration with communities in Bhutan, Nepal, Northern India, and Europe. A long-time educator, she currently serves as a full-time faculty member at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.