Harriet Shorr, Objects of Use to Me, 2008, 70 x 135 inches, oil on canvas

It is with great pleasure that we announce our new exhibition by Harriet Shorr, Objects of Use to Me... Shorr has always incorporated objects into table top landscapes. While her earlier work was closely aligned with color field painting, using lush areas of almost flat color, her recent work extends her masterly use of color as her allegorical subject matter adds multiple layers of fascination and play. The exhibition title, the largest painting in the exhibition, and Shorr's current body of work were inspired by the Matisse photograph of his studio collection captioned "Objects which have been of use to me nearly all my life." Shorr, too has a studio collection that has been of great use to her.

Lilly Wei wrote a beautiful exhibition essay, which she starts with her first response to seeing the title work: "The large, many-splendoured painting that greeted me upon entering Harriet Shorr’s SoHo studio presented an array of shining objects positioned on a beach, waves breaking behind them, a curious juxtaposition."

She goes on to write: "Objects which have been of use to me…serve as a summa aesthetica of her subjects over the years, as if all the actors in a play have gathered together for a curtain call, the waves behind them a metaphor for time and its inexorable passage—or merely a theatrical backdrop. The scene recalls other painters’ tributes to their studios, models and props, such as Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory (1855) or Morandi’s sublimely transfigured bottles and underscores what has engaged Shorr from the first: a formal and philosophical inquiry about perception that turns her paintings into questions leading to other questions. Realism and illusion, content and form, culture and nature, the optical and the conceptual are all aspects of an essential dialectic that form the perceptual and conceptual base of Shorr’s multi-faceted paintings and propel them forward."

A selection of Harriet Shorr’s paintings from this show will go on to the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Art Exhibition that runs from March to April of 2009, where she will also be eligible for the Academy’s Art Awards and Purchase Program.

Ms Shorr graduated from Swarthmore College and Yale School of Art & Architecture. She has been showing regularly since 1974. She is the author of "The Artist’s Eye: A Perceptual Way of Painting" (Watson-Guptill, publisher). Her awards and honors include membership in the National Academy of Design, the Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and awards from the Pollock Krasner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work is in the Chicago Art Institute and The Brooklyn Museum among other museum collections and numerous corporate and private collections. Shorr has an impressive bibliography including articles by Stephen Westfall, William Zimmer, Faye Hirsch, Gerritt Henry, Ken Johnson, Nathan Kernan and Barry Schwabsky. She lives in SoHo in New York city and has a studio there as well as in Vermont.