Gloriane Harris Retrospective Online opens October 21st, 2021 on Artsy/1stdibs.
bG Gallery is proud to partner with the Venice Institute of Contemporary Art (VICA) for the online retrospective Gloriane Harris: 50 Years of Oil & Water, with works just completed in the past few weeks. The show will officially open on October 21st.
Watch the virtual artist interview with Gloriane Harris and Juri Koll here:
On Saturday, February 8 2020, the Venice Institute of Contemporary Art held its Grand Opening celebration in their new space at the Bendix Building in downtown LA with “50 Years of Oil & Water – Gloriane Harris – 1969-2020”.
In the late 60’s and early 1970’s, because of the relative youth of the art scene in LA, artists were leaving for New York en masse — many felt it was their only choice in order to survive. Others, such as Ed & Nancy Keinholz, Lita Albuquerque, George Herms and Gloriane Harris, elected to live and work in LA, and to make the art that they wanted to make without pressure from the NY art market. Add to that an often chauvinist critical bias in favor of artists — such as the Boys Club that hung out at the Ferus Gallery and the departure of of Artforum from offices above the Ferus to NYC — and you have the picture of the tremendous challenge facing artists who were not white, male, and heterosexual. One of the dealers who focused on LA artists and dealt with this exodus to New York first hand was Ellie Blankfort, who showed artists such as Harris and Albuquerque very early in their careers.
“Glorriane Harris is a master of tapping into the sacred geometry of nature; her work chanels the hidden force that travels under the surface of natural elements. We are honored to collaborate on presenting this wide breadth of work demonstrating her unique voice in very different manifestations that all reveal a hidden consistent truth beneath. “ Om Bleicher, October 2021
“Her painting was my very first sale. It was a beautiful work. I am looking forward very much to her retrospective.” Ellie Blankfort, January 2020
ViCA has chosen to focus its exhibition program for 2020 on overlooked artists, beginning with Gloriane Harris.
“We’re proud to present the first retrospective exhibition of Gloriane Harris and her first solo show in 35 years.
Harris has lived and worked on the westside of LA — quite purposely under the radar — for decades. Meanwhile, she was often ahead of her time, such as with her early hard edge work and shaped canvases, which no one has ever seen since she painted them.” Juri Koll, Director/ViCA
“Among other things, Gloriane Harris’s half-century output demonstrates that color-saturated painting in southern California owes little to its East Coast equivalent. Rather, it results from a keen attention to nature and, especially, to light. Harris is nothing if not a Light-and-Space artist; she just happens to rely on paint, brushes, and canvas.” Peter Frank
