It is with great pleasure that we announce our new exhibition by Harriet Shorr, Objects of Use to Me. The exhibition title and largest painting were inspired by the Matisse photograph of his studio collection captioned “Objects which have been of use to me nearly all my life.”

In her exhibition essay, Lilly Wei wrote of the title painting: “The large, many-splendoured painting that greeted me upon entering Harriet Shorr’s SoHo studio presented an array of shining objects positioned on a beach, waves breaking behind them, a curious juxtaposition.”

She goes on to write: “Objects which have been of use to me…serve as a summa aesthetica of her subjects over the years, as if all the actors in a play have gathered together for a curtain call, the waves behind them a metaphor for time and its inexorable passage—or merely a theatrical backdrop. The scene recalls other painters’ tributes to their studios, models and props, such as Courbet’s The Painter’s Studio: A Real Allegory (1855) or Morandi’s sublimely transfigured bottles and underscores what has engaged Shorr from the first: a formal and philosophical inquiry about perception that turns her paintings into questions leading to other questions. Realism and illusion, content and form, culture and nature, the optical and the conceptual are all aspects of an essential dialectic that form the perceptual and conceptual base of Shorr’s multi-faceted paintings and propel them forward.”

A selection of Harriet Shorr’s paintings from this show will go on to the American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Art Exhibition that runs from March to April of 2009, where she will also be eligible for the Academy’s Art Awards and Purchase Program.