NEW YORK, NY.- Stardust, an exhibition of new abstract paintings by Nola Zirin, where futuristic visions of mythic objects and patterns speed, hover and sway in space in an eerie atmosphere of restlessness, opened at the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer Street, on December 18. The works will remain on view through January 21.

Syncopated urban rhythms and light have long been mainstays of Zirin’s art, writes critic Stephen Maine in an essay on the exhibition, “but now a certain otherworldly quality has been brought into play, and the new work luxuriates in this heightened strangeness.”

“Each of these commanding works draws the viewer into an endlessly self-reconfiguring environment where spatial relationships are not fixed, no form is without its qualifiers, and even the shadows have shadows,” Maine says.

Zirin is committed to abstraction, notes Maine, “but her finesse at achieving vast pictorial spaces through geometric means can lead to a reading of her pictures that relies on the genre of cityscape to find its bearings.” Her work, he says, often suggests “a nocturnal world of hidden identities, veiled motives and even a distortion of time itself.”

Zirin’s tools include a spray gun that she uses with stencils that she makes or finds, along with oil paint, spray enamel and glitter. Shards of patterns and motifs seem to drift in and out of focus in hazy gray clouds of tone that terminate at clear, unequivocal edges.

Zirin knows her materials, Maine says, but she also knows that mastering them is merely an exercise unless she succeeds in transporting the viewer — and herself — to a place that is both familiar and strange.

Like Zirin’s childhood memories, Maine concludes, “her paintings are simultaneously in sharp focus and elusive, just beyond the reach of rationality.”

Zirin is a native of New York City. She received a bachelor's degree from New York University and studied printmaking with Robert Blackburn at the Printmaking Workshop in Manhattan.

Zirin’s work has been shown in many one-person and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. She is represented in numerous public and corporate collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY, The Islip Art Museum, Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, The National Museum of Taiwan, The Library of Congress, AT&T, IBM, Reader's Digest, PepsiCo and Bank of Tokyo.