NEW YORK, NY.- The June Kelly Gallery presents recent expressionist paintings by Frances Hynes, an artist whose lyrical abstractions reflect a radical redefinition of painterly space. The exhibition, entitled Layers of Time, opened at the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer Street, on Friday, February 24 and will remain on view through March 28.

Hynes, inspired by wooded landscapes and rugged seacoasts continues to work from the pleasant memories she holds of sojourns in New England or along the coast of Maine. With remarkable competence and ease she marries representation and abstraction in the same composition, allowing her to convey the feel of a place, rather than the actual look of it. With deft blurring of line between abstraction and representation in response to changes in light and weather, as they play off the foliage of the woods or the tossing waves of the ocean, Hynes’ paintings celebrate the rhythm of nature.

In Hynes’ redefining of painterly space her paintings are not predictable. They become metaphorically deepened surfaces that seem to visually speak like the thing they represent, still or slow moving water, as in Horizon. Hynes’ cleverly suggested architectural format of underlying lines, redefines the painterly space by treating the picture plane as a luminousness in which opposing vertical and horizontal forces form and reform themselves into optically mobile grids.

In another approach toward painterly space, Hynes diffuses luminous, optically thickened surfaces in which discrete forms exist in illusionary spatial locations as in Green Hill. In this painting Hynes allows distinction between form and location to vaguely hold up. The limits of the canvas do not define Hynes’ compositions, but rather function as active space to observe painting coming into its being.

Borrowing from Lawrence Alloway, the critic to first use the term lyrical abstraction in the early 50s, works in which under the mask of discrete lyricism are most radical in their presentation are ones that are the sum of their discrete visible parts. Alloway further suggesting that these paintings are “radical,”explain they make no use of the most persistent conventions of western art, the hierarchic ranking of forms.

Hynes, who lives and works in New York, received a bachelor’s degree from St. John’s University and a master’s degree from New York University. She also studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and the Art Students League in Woodstock, New York.

Hynes has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. She is represented in many public and corporate collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Newark Museum, Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Queens Museum of Art, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia and the Albany Institute of History and Art.