A beautiful scenery made from overlapping circles in many shades of colors. This is Audrey Gair’s painting. Gair is a painter who lives and works in Queens, New York. Audrey Gair’s second solo exhibition at King’s Leap Fine Arts featured her works in a neo-pointillistic abstract style of painting with a collage-like approach.
07/04/22 2 Butterfly (2022) is a mesmerizing image of a red butterfly over brown shades overlapping circles. This painting reminds me of piles of brown autumn leaves in a forest. In the center of the butterfly, heart vein-like stems circulate a red line and end up in red organs. This is like a beating heart in organic life, that pumps blood to every single body part.
07/04/22 4 (2022) is the bigger picture of the Butterfly’s environment. Skinny trees in a lovely autumn forest. Visitors in colorful clothes are lining up, walking, and enjoying the beauty of the natural park. Flickering sunlit leaves appears in the distance. Some sheer black ovals in this painting and others of Gair’s works are derived from the artist’s s experience of sun blindness.
Another soothing scenery of the autumn forest is Time of Day (2022). It depicts tree trunks reflected in a puddle. It produces bright and colorful reflections in the water, like nightlights in the bustling city. This painting reminds me of the forest scenery after rain in the autumn days. The view perhaps was informed by her memories of returning home from a short trip. Gair’s use of various colors and circles dissolved the distance between leaves and water reflection.
Skyline (2002) portrays colorful buildings and cityscape in front of overlapping brown circles. This painting blurs between metropolitan and natural life. Gair also applies collaged hole-punched paper painted in gouache across the picture. This line seems to express the emotional feeling that she confronts in everyday life.
Gair’s paintings are the results of her re-interpretation of Impressionism. Her works are often associated with Modern painters, such as Mondrian and Klee. However, Gair turns these influences into landscape painting in her own style called neo-pointillistic.
She was inspired by “urban leisure” and “what a weekend away from the city means for her and her peers.” The title “Fourth of July” refers to American pastoralists’ life in the 19th century. She compares “the conquest of the American landscape” and the desires of New York workers and the middle class to escape from the city. (The press release of Audrey Gair’s exhibition)
Gair’s works delve into her personal experience, historical, spatial, and temporal depictions in pictorial narrative. Her paintings challenge the boundaries between inside and outside, natural and metropolitan, and the modernist with the contemporary.
Audrey Gair 07/04/22 is on view from October 26 – December 18, 2022, at King’s Leap, New York.