NYAB Event - Rene Lynch "Leda's Daughter"

Rene Lynch "Leda's Daughter"

hpgrp gallery

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hpgrp GALLERY NY presents Leda’s Daughter, an exhibition of new paintings by Rene Lynch. These large-scale works present gorgeous women communing with animals in fantastic landscapes of stormy skies and over-scaled roses. These paintings are an expression of Lynch’s life as a woman and an artist, as well as an invitation into her dream world. They are lush with color, romantic, and unapologetically operatic, the manifestations of Lynch’s conviction that she “paints because she breathes.”

Lynch cites numerous sources of inspiration in the work, including the 1948 film The Red Shoes—which is about a ballet dancer who gives everything for her craft much in the same way that Lynch gives everything for her art—as well as tragic and powerful feminist icons; such as the late contemporary artists Pina Bausch and Amy Winehouse, and Joan of Arc, Icarus and Artemis, the magic realism of Japanese anime and the twin concepts of beauty and death depicted in 17th century Dutch Still Life painting.

Referring to the works as self portraits and an “attempt to define a raw truth about women’s creative ambition and sexual energy”, Lynch depicts figures that are more goddesses than they are humans, sporting crowns of gold and plush wings of snow-white feathers, along with other accouterments of wealth, beauty, magical powers, and suffering. They are surrounded by Lynch’s own personal avatars—crows for their cleverness, cats for their sensuality, swans for their fierceness and vulnerability—which offer a glimpse into Lynch’s own psyche, as well as the pathology of her drive as an artist, which like the fairytale of The Red Shoes, she will never be able to cure.

Rene Lynch’s art has been widely exhibited around the world, and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Art and Antiques, The Washington Post, Bunte, Oxford American and American Art Collector. This is her second solo exhibition at hpgrp GALLERY NEW YORK following her 2007 exhibitions in New York and Tokyo. Recent solo exhibitions include; Galerie Kaysser in Munich Germany in 2011, 2008, and 2007, and Jenkins Johnson Gallery NYC and San Francisco in 2009, 2008, and 2007. Recent museum exhibitions include her solo Gaze at Galerie Künstlade in Zittau, Germany in 2008, and major works exhibited at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2006, and the Hunterdon Museum, Clifton, NJ, 2007 and 2005. Lynch studied painting, art history, and critical theory at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has been awarded numerous fellowships including; P.S.1 Museum, NYC, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Oberpfalzer Künstlerhaus, Germany.

[Image: Rene Lynch "Swan Prisoner" (2011-12) oil on canvas, 48 x 72 in.]