Press Release - "Sweeping" by Rachel Kaye
Rachel Kaye
”Blooming Boxes”
Oil on canvas
48 x 36 inches
2020
pt. 2:
Sweeping
Rachel Kaye
Opening - February 13, 2021
Showing Through - Friday, March 2, 2021
Schedule a private viewing
info@part2gallery.com
pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to announce Sweeping, a solo exhibition of new paintings by the San Francisco based painter Rachel Kaye. Sweeping is Kaye’s first exhibition with the gallery. Known for her experimentation in color and texture, Kaye’s newest paintings explore the formal elements of shape and color on a large scale.
Kaye’s meditative paintings balance a soothing sensitivity to color with a careful investigation into shapes. Her abstract compositions resist even the most pareidolic of impulse, even if their original form was once inspired by natural elements.
In countless nuanced moments across Kaye’s paintings, hard edges meet soft textures. Working with water-based oils in thick, quick brushstrokes, her warm pastel tones echo the serenity and peace of a quiet, reflective space. While from afar the transitions from soft green to deep violet, or from mauve to cerulean blue may seem sudden, the interplay and overlap up close gently reminds the viewer that a painting is in fact, a product of the artist’s heart, mind, and hand. The softly wavering edges bring tones together in a gentle embrace, the soft push and pull of tall grass in the wind.
Rachel Kaye
”Blue Chalksticks”
Oil on canvas
30 x 24 inches
2020
In Kaye’s newest work, her abstract forms develop more breathing room on larger canvases. More than double the size of previous works, the increased scale draws attention to the forms of the individual shapes that make up the canvas. In the painting Blue Chalksticks, gentle curves and half circles intersect with rigid diagonal lines, creating both familiar and unfamiliar forms. The painting radiates with various levels of warmth, shifting seamlessly between natural green and earth tones and soothing shades of pale violet and pink. At large scale, the individual forms develop unique presence unseen in Kaye’s smaller works, each with its individual agency rather than being a building block in a complete scene. In Blue Chalksticks, fewer than ten major forms and a border engulf the canvas, some cross the entire picture plane. The relative sparsity reveals the abstraction of Kaye’s influences - images like the curves of a leaf or the movement of a body remain only in subtle nods to their physical form.
The connection to nature and landscape is essential to Kaye’s practice, both on an intimate and widespread scale. Exemplified in the drawing Persimmon Sun but apparent in the tonality of multiple paintings and the recurring image of the orange circle is the list trauma of the apocalyptic orange day that struck California while wildfires ravaged the state. Despite its consistent impact on Kaye’s paintings, the persistent orange functions similar to the rest of Kaye’s palette - instrumental in creation to relieve both the painter and the viewer from the doom and gloom that surrounds media, and even daily life.
Rachel Kaye
”West”
Oil on canvas
30 x 24 inches
2020
Rachel Kaye was born in 1981 and resides in San Francisco. She graduated with her BFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA. Kaye has exhibited nationally and internationally in Paris, Tokyo, San Francisco, Oakland, New York, Los Angeles & Palm Beach. Kaye has collaborated with her husband, artist Jay Nelson on exhibitions as well, blurring the line of artistic ownership and site specific sculpture. She has completed murals for Hook Fish (outer sunset, SF), Chandran Gallery and Facebook (Menlo Park CA). Her work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Refinery 29, Artsy, SF Gate & East Bay Express.