JEREMY STENGER
Phantom Flowers

April 29 - May 31
Opening reception: Saturday, May 3, 6-8pm

Kristen Lorello is delighted to present the gallery’s second solo exhibition of artist Jeremy Stenger.  The exhibition will include five paintings in acrylic on canvas and six related paintings on paper.  Stenger’s paintings feature layered outlines of botanical forms that unfold across the surface from edge to edge.  His works are a celebration of nature and human beings’ intrinsic connection to it.  They also preserve natural elements as fragile and ephemeral artifacts.

 Stenger draws influence from a variety of art historical sources as well as personal experiences, situating his renderings of the forest floor, root systems, and botany within a lineage of art, craft, and family.  Seventeenth Century Sottobosco paintings that figure untouched tangles of budding petals, stems, insects, and birds are as much an influence to Stenger as Man Ray’s double-exposed photographs and photograms of the early 20th Century.  The title of the exhibition nods to the 19th Century craft of preserving the veins of flowers and leaves through a bleaching process called skeletonization and arranging them into groupings to a lace-like effect.  The process is described in ‘Skeleton Leaves and Phantom Flowers,’ published by J.E. Tilton and Company in 1864, a book the artist received as a gift from his wife.  References to family relationships and love find a place in Stenger’s imagery: the pastime of collecting fallen leaves during outdoor walks with his daughters and the here-and-there inclusion of child-like drawings within his patterns.  The bouquet-like compositions of pale yellow flowers that fill his works on paper call to mind the function of floral arrangements to express a range of sentiments, from sympathy to reverie, to affection, mourning and exaltation.

 Time plays a role along the artist’s layered outlines, formed by Stenger’s painstaking process of concealing and excavating paint according to an unfurling line drawing.  Additive layers of paint then sanded into, reveal traces of undercolors ultimately complimented with additional stains and overpainted details.  Calling to mind the act of looking through a microscope, Stenger’s tableaux hold a similar sense of study and discovery of the complexities and fragilities of the natural world.

 Jeremy Stenger was born in San Diego, CA, in 1973 and lives in Barrington, RI.  He received a BFA from California College of Art in 1996 and an MFA from Hunger College in 1999.  He has had solo exhibitions at Kristen Lorello, New York, NY, Silvermine Arts Center, New Canaan, CT, and Hosfelt Gallery, New York, NY.  Recent group exhibitions include ‘Thicket,’ curated by Kristin Lamb, Overlay, Newport, RI (forthcoming), ‘Unrequited Love,’ curated by Vera Iliatova and Sarah Peters, Nathalie Karg Gallery, New York, NY, 2023, ‘Paint,’ curated by Michelle Y. Loh, Silvermine Arts Center, New Canaan, CT, 2021, and ‘Other Nature’, Foley Gallery, New York, NY, 2021.  His works have been discussed in Artcritical, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, and The New York Times, and are included in the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation, Los Angeles CA, and Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection, among others.