Marvelli Gallery is pleased to announce Mira Schor’s first exhibition with the gallery.

Schor’s paintings in this exhibition are intimate meditations on the place of painting in contemporary culture, on the visual artist as a thinker, on painting as a uniquely sensual space for the visualization of thought itself. The exhibition presents a few major themes or progressions along an idea: the idea of contemporary art, painting and theory, the idea of time in history and the life of the individual, and the idea of the dream of social change.

In each painting a figure in a garden holds an open book and looks at ideas represented among the leaves of a shade tree, the private intellectual moment captured on a small, intensely felt, intensely worked painting surface, within the sensual materiality of paint. A figure wakes up to the words Voice and Speech written in cartouches hanging from the tree above her: for Schor painting is a primary meeting ground between “voice” and “speech,” a visual language with its own knowledge that theory is always attempting to repossess and contain. In a just completed quartet of paintings Schor addresses the inspirational impact of the Occupy Movement on contemporary culture by depicting the powerful metaphor of sleep as a transformative social act. She begins with a painting of a sleeping figure dreaming the words The Dreams of All of Us. Further paintings in the series follow that dream into the darkest part of night through to the open possibilities of morning, though that may also be part of the dream.

Schor’s paintings are a meeting ground of politics, conceptualism, and emotion conveyed though the materiality of paint and the immediacy of drawing. In this paintings Schor continues to pursue a fiercely independent, intimate and intellectual studio practice rooted in materiality, experimentation, and intuition.

Schor’s long-standing reputation for criticality and independence from art market concerns, including the critique of excess within her call for a painting that would be both “modest” and rigorous, makes her paintings particularly important to view at this time.