First Floor Gallery

Neysa Grassi

The Beginning of Everything

February 22 – March 31, 2018

Featured News

Neysa Grassi - Exhibitions - Locks Gallery

Warm Spring Rain, 2017

oil on panel

13 1/2 x 13 inches

Recently rediscovered in a studio drawer, Grassi’s collection of small, turn-of-the-century, hand-painted photo cards from National Parks depict waterfalls, lakes and mountains and serve as fresh inspiration for Grassi's newest body of work. Titled The Beginning of Everything, the current Locks exhibition reflects on the artist’s primary sources of inspiration such as Van Gogh’s "Wheat Field in Rain" (1889), which has remained a major touchstone throughout Grassi’s 30+ year painting career. Through the long process of finding the image from within, the artist channels brooding qualities from Courbet’s mysterious Cave paintings and poetic compositions by Albert Pinkham Ryder into her own lush, multi-layered surfaces.

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Press Release

Locks Gallery proudly presents The Beginning of Everything, marking the ninth solo exhibition at the gallery by Philadelphia-based artist and teacher Neysa Grassi. There will be an opening reception with the artist on Thursday, February 22nd from 5:30-7:30 pm.

With an enigmatic color palette, the gallery will debut a selection of 15 new oil paintings which continue to defy expectations of abstraction and offer the artist’s impressions of interacting light, water, and atmosphere. Like the ebb and flow of tides, Grassi’s multi-layered, additive and subtractive painting process emulates surface-level ripples and currents arising from an unknown disruption. Continuing to suggest sources flowing, weather patterns, and emanating light, Grassi’s paintings fixate on unnamable colors and imagery.

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