NEW YORK, NY.- Hirschl & Adler Modern is presenting The swamps are pink with June, Julie Heffernan’s debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Across fifteen new paintings, the artist’s female protagonists, stand-ins for the viewer and the artist herself, inhabit lush gardens and resplendent trees. Nestled beside blooms of rich color are scenes and depictions from western art history. The Fall of Adam & Eve, Hudson River School landscapes, and portraits of Queen Victoria blossom from expansive branches. In others, dense shrubs grow from under the central figure’s skirt, rooting her to the landscape that surrounds her. Climate activism, feminism, identity and lineage are the major themes of Heffernan’s career and here they entangle in fresh and welcoming ways.

Included is Heffernan’s newest body of work, her Spill paintings. Born out of the artist’s search for fresh energy in the studio, Heffernan began pouring paint onto canvas to begin each work. The splashes of color that pooled on the surface captured by accident the same energy that she would so painstakingly try to render. Working back into these spills unlocked worlds within worlds, adding a logic and a structure to an otherwise haphazard and random order. The artist herself writes: What I’ve found in the paint spills now is something akin to the chaos I need to describe the actual chaos happening in our environment right at this moment.

Yet, a sense of optimism runs through the paintings, linking them to the Emily Dickinson poem whose line serves as the title of the exhibition. Dickinson writes of the cycles of nature and life, as experienced through her garden, and how out of the bleakest of times things will return to flower and grow. As we continue to push forward through our own dark era, it is good to remember that Spring will always arrive, and for those of us who keep “an Orchis' heart—The swamps are pink with June.”

Julie Heffernan (b. 1956) was raised in Northern California, received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in printmaking and painting from University of California at Santa Cruz, and earned a Master of Fine Arts at Yale School of Art. She is a Professor of Fine Arts at Montclair State University and Co-founder of the journal Painters on Paintings. In 2011, Heffernan was elected a National Academician to the National Academy of Design in New York and in 2014, to the Board of Governors. She is a 2017 Fellow of the BAU Institute at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France; was awarded the Meridian Scholar Artist-In-Residence Fellowship from the University of Tampa in Florida and was the featured artist for the 2017 MacDowell Colony. In 2013, Heffernan was awarded a Milton And Sally Avery Fellowship at MacDowell and in 2012, she was invited to be the Lee Ellen Fleming Artist-In-Residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. In 2010, she was the Commencement Speaker for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and in 2009, she was the featured artist at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, a Fulbright-Hayes grant to Berlin, Heffernan was also a nominee for the "Anonymous Was A Woman" award. Since 1999, Heffernan has had more than 50 solo exhibitions at museums and other venues across the United States and abroad. Her work is represented in 25 museum and institutional collections. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

This exhibition is accompanied by an online exhibition catalogue, available here and through Hirschl & Adler’s website.