The gallery is pleased to announce Spells, Spoils & Lucky Charms, an exhibition of new work by New York-based painter, Echo Eggebrecht. In rendering evocative interior and exterior spaces, the artist explores the confrontation between individual memory and collective history. A recurrent use of personal symbols populates her interior world, whereas the stylish disarray of her vacant spaces invites the viewer to project his or her own meanings. The artist explains the relationship between public and private in her paintings: “Abandoned houses, rooms full of animals and girls in lingerie, hospital rooms and childhood bedrooms – the work is expansive in scope, but localized in moments of experience.”

The artist’s oil-on-panel works delightfully juxtapose folky charm and exquisite decorative detail, lush patterns pop against broad swaths of flat color. The work is simultaneously solemn and exuberant, a quality that aligns these paintings with those of Matisse, namely his early pictures of interiors, displaying the same fascination for pattern and detail though captured here with a scientific eye. Eggebrecht’s painstaking technique recalls Dutch genre painting and traditional still-life models in its serious precision, but it is her affinity for materials, surface quality and a love of objects – they are her main subject – that comprise the unique character of her work.

Echo Eggebrecht (b. 1977, Bangor, MN) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received a MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has had residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, NE. Her work has been included in solo exhibitions at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, New York and Ter Caemer Meert Contemporary, Kortijk, Belgium. She has been included in group exhibitions at Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn; Ulrich Museum, Wichita, KS; and Monya Rowe Gallery, New York; among others. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times and Artcritical.com. Spells, Spoils & Lucky Charms is the artist’s first solo show with Horton Gallery.