Bloom | Lindsey Ries

Bloom | Lindsey Ries

In this show of brand new paintings, Lindsey Ries uses flowers to find her roots

Local painter Lindsey Ries is known primarily for her abstracted paintings of buildings and farmscapes, rendered in flat, airy tones and spacious compositions, like some combination of Hockney, Hopper, and Diebenkorn. But for this upcoming exhibition at Showroom, Ries has embarked on an entirely new body of work focused this time on flowers.

 

 

“The floral paintings were relatively personal pieces when I started to do them,” Ries explains. “My family has always really enjoyed gardening, and even though I’m not the best at it, painting the flowers gave me a way to connect to the women in my family who still live in southwest Wisconsin and are devout gardeners.”

 

Combining realistic rendering with more stylized abstraction, Ries’s flowers float and dance through empty color fields, some fully formed, others left as rough outlines or quick paint scrapes. The effect is of the old meeting the new, as though classic floral wallpaper patterns have been unleashed in zero gravity. She has a few favorites—“poppies, hydrangeas, anemones, and others,” she says—some of which are picked for their colors, others because they are varieties her mother and grandmother grow. Although many of the colors and compositional choices mirror her earlier architectural work, Ries says these paintings represent “a new, refreshing body of work that I paint using more open and free brush strokes. I feel it reflects my personality and my connection to the women in my life even more.” All told, the work is calm, contemplative, but playful, and just in time for Spring.

 

 

Showroom is a retail boutique in Uptown of, by, and for local Twin Cities makers. Run by fashion designers Kimberly Jurek and Jen Chilstrom, Showroom brings all the best of local art, fashion, jewelry, furniture, and interior design under one roof.

 

Join them Saturday, April 8th from 5 – 8pm for the opening reception of Bloom.

 

All images courtesy of the artist.


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