Winter Garden

13 Forest Gallery
Arlington, MA
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January 9 - March 8, 2019

“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.” - Claude Monet

Flowers have served as a perennial muse to artists across cultures and centuries. With their endless variety, beauty and symbolic potential, flowers have inspired some of history’s most beloved works of art. As a remedy for the upcoming months of darkness and cold, 13FOREST Gallery is delighted to present Winter Garden, an exhibition of three contemporary artists who use their botanical subject matter to explore color, line, and form in continuation of a long-standing art historical tradition.

Mary O’Malley, Carlos Santiago and Anne Silber demonstrate the range of possibilities that flowers present as an artistic subject. O’Malley draws on Eastern decorative traditions, creating vibrant and intricate floral patterns that convey a deep appreciation for our natural environment. Santiago’s richly colored still lifes emphasize geometry, with energetic lines that extend the planes of his floral arrangements across the composition. Using transparent inks and hand-cut stencils, Silber’s serigraph technique depicts leaves and petals in graphic shapes and soft, harmonious colors. Each approach in Winter Garden offers a unique mode for appreciating the vivid expressions of nature and the power of art to render the most familiar subjects new again.