PONTIAC, MI.- The Museum of New Art presents will present Stella Vine - bluebells, hollyhocks and honesty opening September 15 through October 28. The English painter Stella Vine creates her paintings with just the bare minimum required to give the works something like space extending from the picture plane, forestalling vertigo. The sensationalism of the images' content sometimes obscures the real joy in the work, but with a list of subjects that careens from Jean Harlowe, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Frida Kahlo, Sid and Nancy, and Princess Diana to the artist's relatives, it's hard not to look for meaning.

'When Charles Saatchi purchased her painting of Diana, Princess of Wales, Stella Vine was propelled into the centre of a media frenzy and aspects of her life story were filtered through that particularly English kaleidoscope that is tabloid tale telling. Somehow in all this temporary fiction, in the whole hoopla of burlesque outrage, the main point got lost - the work itself.

Stella Vine is a contemporary figurative painter, a tightropey place to be at present. Her paintings, however, far from being stuck in some kind of revisionist retreading, trace a radical trajectory that connects the Rococo lyricism of Gainsborough to the Kitchen Sink storytelling of John Bratby, arriving at a modern gothic soup of Dark Romanticism where it is possible to discern the artist thinking with her brush.

Vine's darkling theatre of identification, re-defines a contemporary axis of representation where the melancholic gravitas of the work is often balanced by deft touches of black humour. After the recent intense media scrutiny of her private life, Stella has spent time making new work, retreating into a fictive world “like a lost girl... a deranged teenager trying to make an environment of loves, memories and desires”.

Not unlike the songs of P.J Harvey, which “dramatise the conflicts of desiring and being desired”, Vine explores “a kind of self exposure that uniquely combines seduction and threat, intimacy and estrangement”. - Alex Michon.