Janet Alling: Plant Life

March 02 - April 06,2024

From Seven Sisters:

"Seven Sisters celebrates the opening of Janet Alling: Plant Life with a reception on Saturday, March 2, 2024, from 2–4 PM and an artist talk at 4 PM.

This marks Alling’s debut exhibition at Seven Sisters and her first gallery representation since the 1980s. With paintings dating from the 1970s to the present, this introduction to her verdant work highlights the artist’s devotion to nature as a serial subject.

In Plant Life, larger-than-life fuzzy begonia leaves sit near gardens of animated blossoms and cloud-filled skies. A pair of early Coleus paintings (1971 and 1974) display an almost anatomical botany, winding the viewer through the plant’s architectural stalks and into a network of dappled, veiny leaves. Later,  more tightly cropped paintings from the Pattern series reveal the strangeness of repetition. Through recurrence, Alling’s representational range evolves from depicting her earthly subjects’ surface, color, and light to capturing the essence of their personality. Dedicated to a habitual painting practice driven by cyclical change and keen perception, Alling works “to reveal the dynamics and energy, the chaos, and the calm that nature reveals.”

Janet Alling (b. 1939 New York City, NY) lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. Since childhood, Alling has been interested in the arts, utilizing the freedom of artistic expression that allowed her to process a turbulent past. Her experience at Yale expanded her knowledge of the arts and herself, allowing Alling to realize the freedoms she wanted in life and art. Alling first attended Skidmore College of Art and transferred to Yale College of Art and Architecture, studying under Alex Katz and Phillip Pearlstein. She graduated with her MFA in 1964 among a legendary generation of artists, including Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Janet Fish, Rackstraw Downs, and Brice Marden. They turned contemporary art making into a revolution of material, scale, subject, and perception. In that vein, Alling focused on capturing and magnifying the natural world to redefine a category of painting long regarded as decorative and conventional. The Kornblee Gallery, NY represented her from the late 1970s until Mrs. Kornblee’s retirement in the mid-1980s.

In 2023, she was included in the exhibition Womanish: Audacious, Courageous, Willful Art at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, and in the NY Studio School’s Annual Benefit Auction, as well as being a featured speaker in their Spring 2023 Evening Lecture Series. Past solo shows include exhibits at Newport Art Museum, RI; York College, CUNY, Jamaica, Queens, NY; St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary's City, Maryland; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Alling’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum of Art, Providence, RI; NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine Collection, NY; Florists Transworld Delivery Collection, Southfield, MI; Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Bank of America Art Collection; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; and the Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI. "

Reception: March 02, 2024 | 2-4 pm

Seven Sisters 805 Rhode Place, Suite 500
Houston, Texas 77019
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