Solo Exhibition | Fall Arts Festival, Jackson Hole, WY
Altamira Fine Art is pleased to welcome September Vhay for a new show during the Jackson Hole Fall Arts Festival, opening September 3rd, 2019.
Please join us and meet the artist during the annual Palettes and Palates festival kick-off event, Friday night, September 6, 5-8pm.
Movement is the through line of September Vhay’s newest paintings, bright and brisk. Joyful is a strutting raven, a buoyant colt, five mares racing toward the viewer. Even when less literal—like the horse with eyes locked beyond the canvas—movement feels imminent, the force animating her sparse scenes.
An architect by training and an artist by instinct and passion, Vhay paints and lets the theme rise in reflection. Cheerful readiness did in this instance, hence the exhibition title, Alacrity. Beyond nomenclature, this series epitomizes Vhay’s mastery of the moment, the instant when a creature acts solely of its own accord, compelled by impulse, full with being. Several paintings focus so intensely on the subject, they read as portraits: a grizzly bear pausing in profile, a palomino prancing.
Context fades into gestures, and Vhay’s tolerance for negative space shines—a restraint refined over the years and over explorations such as in her red horses. A recent intervention by a friend encouraged her to stop working on an oil sketch of a skull. The one eye socket and horn Vhay had painted spoke volumes as is; don’t do anymore, the friend said. The partiality became an essential eloquence.
“I want to become even more minimal,” Vhay says. “Pulling away from context is part of that pursuit.” Her interpretation of minimal embodies energy, kinetic or potential. She observes action as life in nature with a patient resolve in her Wyoming home. So even as the surroundings fade into subtlety in her paintings, her grounding in place remains profoundly present as inspiration.
“I keep my life quiet in general, which helps me see more clearly,” she says. “The context of my practice is quiet, which allows me to bring quiet content into my painting.”
Alacrity runs from September 3 to 15, with n opportunity to meet the artist during Friday night's Palatesa and Palettes event, September 6th, 5-8pm.
Pre-sales available. Contact the gallery for more details, connect@altamiraart.com, (307) 739-4700.
