NEW YORK, NY.- Orbs and Angles, an exhibition of new paintings by Nola Zirin, reflecting the artist’s faithfulness to a pictorial geometry, opened at the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer on Friday, May 12. The exhibition will remain on view through June 13, 2017.

Zirin says her recent paintings navigate the use of geometric form in the construction of imaginary environments. While color remains vibrant, she expands both the palette and medium. Light is enhanced by glitter and texture by flocking, creating a 3-dimensional quality engaging the viewer into other-worldly spaces.

Zirin’s works are abstract yet a representational cleverness is present that is extremely lucid and matched by a painting method that is direct and orderly. At no time does Zirin’s painting reflect total abstraction even though the subject matter is mysterious.

Art writer Jill Connor says, “ Zirin’s unique, visual dynamism in the genre of abstraction reflects the artist’s signature layering process in rephrasing pictorial space through sweeping, painterly gestures, creating a suggestion of three-dimensional space, placeless but familiar within the experience of one’s subjective perception.”

Zirin’s spatial absurdities are like visual intoxication. Her rendering of pictorial space defies consistency per ‘set-rule’ but rises from the knowledgeable and competent act of painting out…of searching. Zirin’s paint holds tight to the surface a sequence of images where spatial forms collide, contradict each other, convexities are turned into concavities, planes move forward, flip over and recede, grounded forms suddenly appear airborne as in BQE Suspension, 2017.

Zirin explores high and low horizons as a means of giving character and expressive force to her pictorial landscapes as in Suspension, 2017, where she posited a viewpoint that clears the space in the centre of the painting and pushes detail toward its edges.

Zirin’s concern is with discovering an expressive visual language of marks that purposefully describe form and space equally effectively. Her density of color is more than optical. It gives rise to muscular memory sensations about the ambiguousness of speed, volume and spatial relationships.

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.