Ruth Mordecai
New Work 2023
October 28, 2023 – November 27, 2023
- This event has passed.
Matthew Swift Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of 20 new paintings on paper by Ruth Mordecai, on view October 28 – November 27 December 4, 2023.
The Gallery will host a reception in honor of the artist on Saturday, October 28th, 5–7pm.
Together with a bronze sculpture from 1983, the paintings compose her fifth solo exhibition at the Gallery.
A hallmark of Ruth Mordecai’s art is movement that is not mere activity but the record of a mind and spirit moving through life. We sense this movement as she speaks about her work, telling of its occasions and subjects, telling of the intentions, feelings, and insights which propelled her from one to the next in a series of paintings. And we see the movement there, visually, in her sculptural forms, there in her human figures, there in her layered accumulations of tokens of what is good and beautiful and loved and—as the movement itself testifies—transitory.
In the series The Kiss, Mordecai engages, for the first time as an artist, directly with the experience of loss, an experience at once universal and painfully specific. With it, her hallmark movement extends its range, sweeping us up and moving us with it. When she returns, with simple grace, in the same body of work, to subjects which have inspired her and which she has animated throughout her long career, we find renewed and deepened delight in these familiar forms of her creative vision.