Galerie Marguo is pleased to present Stepping Out, a suite of new works by American artist Rebecca Ness. On view from 18 October - 27 November, this marks the artist’s first exhibition in France and with the gallery.
Comprising six large-scale canvases and five works on paper, the luscious blue and green still lifes and portraits in this series evoke the many cycles and rhythms of life, constituting a sort of nonlinear bildungsroman, or narrative of personal growth typically associated in literary terms with the so-called ‘coming of age’ novel. Drawn from the fabric of the artist’s personal life – friends, family, experiences and observations – these works make time material, melding memory, metaphor, and art historical references into one visual lexicon that builds on the artist’s practice of worldmaking through graphic, densely composed, and vividly colored figuration.
For the past few years, well before most of us were confined to our homes, Ness’ works were oriented inwards, depicting intricately detailed interior spaces brimming with a dizzying mise-en-abyme of everyday objects, or tightly cropped, perspectively skewed portraits of the metonymic objects, clothes, and body parts from which identity can be inferred. By comparison, these new paintings, as the exhibition title suggests, register a paradigm shift in the artist’s approach. Painted over the summer of 2021, during a transitional period in the artist’s life and practice, Stepping Out reflects a turning out towards the natural world that is at once vulnerable and expansive.
