Gallery Luisotti is delighted to announce our fourth solo exhibition with New York-based artist Shirley Irons celebrating the release of her first comprehensive publication, Composition, and the gallery’s parallel presentation of paintings showcasing four-decade of work mixing her industrial landscapes and anonymous highways with her most recent focus, the flower. Irons subtle oil paintings made between 1988 and 2019 of landscape fragments and urban interiors based on photographs taken as she drives through exurban landscapes, blends realistic details with abstract applications of paint to explore how much information is necessary to render an image legible. These fleeting landscape scenes often capturing the perspective of someone on the move, gives meditative attention to side-glances and everyday objects. Influences include late Manet, Morris Graves, Janice Biala and particularly Vija Celmins in the way she extracts moments in the landscape and creates a simple, nuanced rendition of a lamp or a tiny section of the ocean or sky, fleeting moments of infinity. The flower paintings represent a paradigmatic shift as Irons transitioned to painting directly from observation, rather than using photographs as references. As such, these new paintings consider a different way of seeing, reinforced by a salon-style hang where the movement of one’s eye across the canvases parallels the motion of the artist’s hand across the canvas. Moments of heartfelt consideration, visual pleasure, or poignant passages echo in Irons paint handling—the tenuous strokes of pale green that portray a fragile stem, the bristly pointillism of the flower’s luminescent fronds, and the subtly monochromatic shading of the flowers themselves—meditating on the passage of time and the joys of close looking. By highlighting these in-between moments and spaces the artist expands how we think about the world around us, eloquently capturing the fragmentation of modern life and the ephemeral nature of our existence with elegant pulses of painterly movement through time and space. Please join us on Saturday, February 1, 5 – 7pm to celebrate the artists new exhibition and book launch. Composition is published by MACK Books, UK. Image: Shirley Irons, 2nd Black Highway, 2003