Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to present Vortical by Carolanna Parlato. This will be her second exhibition with the gallery.

For this exhibition, Parlato presents paintings that fuse her signature material; thick fluid acrylic pours with brushstrokes and pools of thinner paint. While open to multiple associations and varied interpretation – colliding storm fronts or clashing ocean currents – the work remains fundamentally abstract.

In the catalogue essay for this exhibition, Charlotta Kotik writes: “There is more than a trace of the romantic sensibility in Parlato’s colorful abstractions. They are lush and expressive, full of fantasy and hidden mysteries. Inherently dramatic they often point toward the exalted dynamism of baroque sensitivity. ……. Fully dedicated to painting, yet subverting its principles of flatness and containment, Parlato repeatedly demonstrates that this venerable medium, periodically proclaimed “dead”, has an inexhaustible capacity for renewal, transcendence and beauty.”

A leading proponent of painterly process abstraction, Carolanna Parlato has exhibited her work widely in New York and nationally. Parlato was born in Brooklyn and received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has been reviewed in Art in America, the Boston Globe and the New York Sun. Recently, her work was included in “Material Color” at the Hunterdon Art Museum, and in “Kuf –Mold” an exhibition originating in Istanbul, then traveled to the Jan Colle Gallery in Ghent and then to A-Lokatie Gallery in Rotterdam. She has exhibited in numerous group exhibitions including “Open House” at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, “Splat” at the Sabina Lee Gallery (LosAngeles), Sandroni Rey (Los Angeles), Amy Simon Fine Art (Westport, CT), OH+T Gallery (Boston), White Box (NY), Schroeder/Romero and Cristinerose galleries (NY). Carolanna Parlato’s paintings are represented in many private and public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Francis Greenberger Collection, Islip Art Museum, Reader’s Digest, and Pfizer Inc.

An illustrated catalogue with an essay by Charlotta Kotik accompanies the exhibition.