Kate Robinson Fine Art announces its representation of artist Rachel Klinghoffer Bender (b.1982) with her first solo exhibition, “Two Blue,” unveiling two series of landscape paintings that display the artist’s consistent and evolving exploration of color.

The first series was realized between 2005 and 2006 and uses abstract blocks of acrylic paint on canvas to evoke landscapes that resonate more as fantastic memories of places rather than actual locations. The unexpected, artificial coloration of these works subverts our mythic expectations of eastern and western landscapes and raises questions of national identity that refuse easy answering.

The second series features two just completed works that herald the artist’s new direction: The use of landscapes to explore the phenomenon of “structural coloration,” which is the means of light reflection (as opposed to pigmentation) by which peacock feathers, rainbows, and the sky, for example, derive the colors we perceive. These works are painted with acrylic on canvas, and the inherent dissonance between their synthetic medium and ephemeral subject matter makes us question the very nature of painting.