PHILADELPHIA, PA.- Locks Gallery is presenting The Beginning of Everything , marking the ninth solo exhibition at the gallery by Philadelphia-based artist and teacher Neysa Grassi.
With an enigmatic color palette, the gallery debuts a selection of 15 new oil paintings which continue to defy expectations of abstraction and offer the artist’s impressions of interacting light, water, and atmosphere. Like the ebb and flow of tides, Grassi’s multi-layered, additive and subtractive painting process emulates surface-level ripples and currents arising from an unknown disruption. Continuing to suggest sources flowing, weather patterns, and emanating light, Grassi’s paintings fixate on unnamable colors and imagery.
Recently rediscovered in a studio drawer, Grassi’s collection of small, turn-of-the-century handpainted photo cards from National Parks depict waterfalls, lakes and mountains and serve as fresh inspiration for this body of work. Titled The Beginning of Everything , the current Locks exhibition reflects on the artist’s primary sources of inspiration such as Van Gogh’s Wheat Field in Rain (1889), which has remained a major touchstone throughout Grassi’s 30+ year painting career. Through the long process of finding the image from within, the artist channels brooding qualities from Courbet’s mysterious Cave paintings and poetic compositions by Albert Pinkham Ryder into her own lush, multi-layered surfaces.
This selection of work is thoughtfully paired with an exhibition by Lynda Benglis on the floor above, who’s sculptures allude to and embody physical gestures of flowing. The gallery will also hold extended hours for First Friday, March 2nd.
Neysa Grassi, a recipient of a Pew Fellowship, has had solo exhibitions at venues including the Maryland Institute College of Art, the Pensacola Art Museum, FL; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, PA; Swathmore College, PA; and the University of Delaware, DE. Since 1990, the artist has had over 20 one-person exhibitions in galleries in Philadelphia and New York. Grassi is currently a critic in the Masters of Fine Arts program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Berman Museum of Art, the Palmer Museum, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Woodmere Art Museum.
