Nora Speyer: Trees on Patience Brook

Denise Bibro Fine Art, 529 West 20th Street, Chelsea, NYC, is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of Nora Speyer, “Trees on Patience Brook”, from January 25 – February 24, 2007.

In her fifth solo exhibition at Denise Bibro Fine Art, Nora Speyer continues to explore plein air landscape through rich color and bravura brushwork. She builds up her surfaces with oil paint, continually working back into the tacky, removing elements and adding new ones. The result is an impression of a place that is meant to be exact, but also generalized by the elapsing of time over the duration of each painting.

Speyer’s works blend elements of Expressionism and Impressionism along with a tradition of American landscape painting. Specifically, artists such as Bonnard and Redon come to mind as aesthetic touchstones. Though she doesn’t evoke them directly, her sensibilities about space and atmosphere benefit from lingering ghosts of the Hudson River painters such as Asher Durand and Thomas Cole. Her craggy, accumulated surfaces also recall the abstractions of Milton Resnick. Each of these disparate attributes conspire to create the eccentric uniqueness of Nora Speyer’s work.

Specifically, the paintings in “Trees on Patience Brook” are the result of two years of careful observation of the brook that runs near her studio in Wellfleet, MA. The paintings are both calm and expressive; calm from the nature of the place itself and Nora’s unavoidable sensitivity to it, and expressive from her naturally intense painterly approach to representing place. Speyer aims to capture the essence of landscape that runs through all individuals. She looks to capture it optically as well as emotionally; analytically and psychologically.

Nora Speyer was born in Pittsburgh, PA and has lived in New York City for many years. Speyer has had numerous solo and group exhibitions. This is her fifth solo exhibition at Denise Bibro Fine Art. She has also shown at Galerie Darthea Speyer in Paris, Longpoint Gallery, Provincetown, MA, Concept Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA, and Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. Her work has been exhibited at the National Academy, where she is a member, Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto, PA, and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Her works are in prominent public collections such as the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C., Fidelity Bank, Philadelphia, PA, Hyatt Hotel, New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Nelson Rockefeller Collection to name a few.

There will be a reception for the artist Thursday, January 25, 2007 from 6-8 pm.