Trotter&Sholer is pleased to present Shifting Spaces, a solo show by Kerry Irvine, curated by Clayton Calvert. Irvine is a prolific painter who incorporates a wide variety of mediums and materials into her work. She paints abstractly with fluidity and in a subtle way that is often an allusion to her subject.
Shifting Spaces explores the environment’s influence on the outcome of an artwork. The exhibition considers the role that location and space play in terms of psychology, energy, and creativity. 2020 confined most of us to spaces we normally spent only a few hours in each day and prevented us from visiting locations we usually frequent. For Irvine, this meant abandoning her large-scale, light-soaked studio on the 80th floor of 3 World Trade Center and reinhabiting her kitchen studio practice.
Moving back into her studio as restrictions lifted saw Irvine return to larger scale works that with more open space and breadth. The Bullfighter and the Ballerina conveys a vast expanse around a central scene. Like the Kitchen Series it retains an electric energy, charged with the ions of a frenetic year, but less confined and less fraught. It is a testament to Irvine’s talent and vision that she was able to channel the experiences of 2020 into beautiful works that capture the year’s intensity while remaining inspiring, full of color and life.
Like many of us this past year Irvine worked from home, from her kitchen table. The resulting Kitchen Series is predictably smaller in scale than much of the work she creates at 3 World Trade, but it is also energetically more compact and frenetic. The emotions of the early quarantine are contained in the comparatively small works.
Shifting Spaces offers a mix of motif and scale and the selection offers a powerful dialogue among Irvine’s recent works. It reminds us that as we move through new spaces and changing environments our energies and worldviews are affected, but we are capable of adjustment, adaptation and re-orientation.
Shifting Spaces is on view from January 14 to February 14, 2021 at Trotter&Sholer, 168 Suffolk Street. A virtual tour of Irvine's studio can be found at trotterandsholer.com.
Kerry Irvine is an abstract expressionist painter living and working in New York City. Highly expressive, her work is infused with light color, motion and a bit of mysticism. Through these elements, she takes us on a personal journey of vulnerability while allowing room for viewers to bring their own perspectives to the story. Irvine’s passion for art was nurtured by her late mother, also an abstract expressionist painter. Rooted in color and form, her work often calls on nature, landscape and the human figure to inspire her. Currently, Irvine’s studio is located on the 8oth floor of 3 World Trade Center, allowing the expansive views of the city to compliment the expressive lines of her work. Irvine holds a BFA from C.W. Post Long Island University and spent four years at The Art Students League of New York. Her work is included in the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York, as well as in private collections in the United States and abroad.
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