NEW YORK, NY.- June Kelly Gallery presents Elise Asher: Poetic Landscapes, on view at 166 Mercer Street, from January 20 through February 21, 2017.

Asher, who died at the age of 92 in 2004, has been represented by the gallery since 1991. Her career as a visionary painter and poet spanned more than five decades, starting with a one-woman show of paintings in 1953 and the publishing of a collection of poetry in 1955. Asher, an abstractionist on natural forms had an uncanny ability to mix verse with illustration. She created visual and written puns from her extraordinary sense of humor.

Asher’s paintings reflect the poet, as well as the poems mirror the painter. From the very beginning of her artistic journey, she embodied the poetic experience – visionary and timeless. “I try to translate the poetry of existence, its beauty and its terror, into a vocabulary of the visual imagination,” she once said. “This painted transformation seeks a more than usual state of being, the condition of otherness.”

Asher’s lyrical and evocative imagery summons that soulful awareness…that search for the mysterious transcendence as in “Steps of a Dreamer…" where rungs on the side of a mountain lead to ambiguous journey’s end. Then, with surrealist expression, Asher gives us a spider with a clock within its web traveling precariously the edge of cliff in “Caught in Time.” Inventive, realizing her poetry as inspiration, mixing the mythic and the mundane, using lavender, purportedly, her favorite color, she places a mother peacock within the grasses, not hovering, yet watching out for her daughter, in the painting titled, “Mother and Daughter.”

As seen in this body of work, Asher transcended language by applying brush to canvas, creating mystical panoramas in a vivid palette. “Idiosyncratic, tender and tough” describe the haunting sometime eerie psychological enigmas in Asher’s paintings.

Asher, the wife of Stanley Kunitz, a former poet laureate of the United States, was born in Chicago and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. She graduated from the Simmons School of Social Work in Boston before moving to New York City in 1947. Asher has had numerous one-person and group exhibitions throughout the United States. Her work is represented in museum, corporate and private collections, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Provincetown Art Association and Museum; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; the University of California Art Museum, Berkeley; First National Bank of Chicago; Weatherspoon Art Gallery,