The gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Loren MacIver: Poetic Vision, a survey of fourteen paintings and selected drawings from the 1930s to 80s that reveals Loren MacIver’s (American, 1909 – 1998) unique sensibility to observe and capture the poetic spirit of the everyday objects and environments that engaged and inspired her.

From her West Village home and studio on Perry Street to the extended time she spent in Paris in the 1960s, MacIver looked to her everyday surroundings for inspiration. Subjects included subway lights, votive candles, a clawfoot tub in a window, flowers, trees, studio interiors and the landscape. Her style has been described as a lyrical semi-abstraction based on observation and infused with light, softness and mystery – where oil paint is handled with the discretion of pastel and everyday life is transmuted into the emblematic.

On the occasion of her participation in the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking show, Fourteen Americans (1946), MacIver, whose paintings were the first by a woman to enter the museum’s permanent collection, said of her own work:

Quite simple things can lead to discovery. This is what I would like to do with painting: starting with simple things, to lead the eye by various manipulations of colors, objects and tensions toward a transformation and a reward. An ashcan suggests the phoenix; its relics begin a new life, like a tree in spring. Votive lights, flickering and vanishing, become symbols of constancy.