Ellen Miller Gallery is pleased to announce Isabel Riley’s solo exhibition of her recent paintings: Gutsy, November 4th-November 27th. Riley has an extensive exhibition history in the Boston area and a wide collector base. It is an honor and a pleasure to be working closely with Isabel Riley and this rich new body of work. Please join the artist on November 4th for the opening reception and First Friday, from 6-8 pm.
Isabel Riley has guts when it comes to the practice of painting. Her process is systematic as the initial structure of her paintings get laid down, but then her intuition and her painterly skills take over. Her paintings are worked and reworked with much sanding down and scratching out, so that the true “guts” of the painting can emerge. Certain forms and gestures repeat themselves across her bodies of work: hourglass, figure eights, triangular shapes, and luxurious squiggles and loops. We get caught in their elegant web and feel the powerful embrace of her paintings. There is a unique energy to Riley’s paintings. They do not seduce but rather command the viewer to experience their rich and courageous spirit.
