4/3~ 4/21/2018

Opening Reception: Saturday, April 7th, 2018 6-8PM

The Riverside Gallery presents IRIDESCENCE, a solo exhibition by American artist Marsha Heller from April 3rd to April 21st, with its opening reception on Saturday, April 7th at 6PM. In Heller’s exhibition IRIDESCENCE, the viewer experiences her canvases of landscapes, skyscapes, intimate details of nature or its broad vistas, as acts of passion rendered through an artist’s discipline. It is this tension between discipline and passion—indeed, resonance and dissonance—which provides the images with power and delicacy in equal measure.

Heller’s color palette, with its extraordinary range from bold to soft and shimmering, is less concerned with empirical fact than with experienced truth. And yet, the facts of nature are there: in the brilliance of light, the burst of wetland grasses, the roil of wind, all rendered through strokes of color and suffused with energy of iridescence.

Though the images in Iridescence infer a panorama of disparate places, which in many cases they are, the result of Heller’s travels as a musician, the images are just as often the result of rear view glimpses while driving, or seen in corners of Heller’s garden in Leonia, New Jersey. It is Heller’s gift to feel the splendor of nature in places majestic or intimate and to communicate what she feels through color, line, and shape.

In works such as “Wind on the Plains” and “Phragmites,” the energy of nature bursts from the surface to meet the passion of the artist. What appears to be the wild strokes of the artist’s palette knife enhance this feeling of bursting bounds, and yet the discipline of control is there. We see it—or rather, feel it—in the perfect interaction of the colors on the canvas; enhanced from the random acts of nature and brought into the harmony of art.

Heller’s New York exhibitions include such significant venues as the Cork Gallery in Lincoln Center, Phoenix Gallery, and St. Peter’s Church in the Citicorp Building. In her home state of New Jersey, the state’s respected Montclair State University Gallery One featured Heller in a solo exhibition. She has been the recipient of various juried prizes, and Artspeak Magazine has described her work as “colors (creating) a shimmering surface….Warm and cool, light and dark, they dance around the canvas until flowers, bushes or trees emerge from a tapestry of marks. The seductive mosaic of color is satisfying in itself.”

Heller’s work was chosen to represent New Jersey in the permanent collection of PNC Bank in Pittsburgh, and is also included in numerous private collections. Her encaustic painting, “Emerging Spring,” was selected for inclusion in Marcie Cooperman’s seminal textbook, “Color: How to Use It,” published in 2013 by the educational publisher Pearson in coordination with Parsons/The New School of Design.

In addition to the Riverside Gallery, Heller is represented by Ceres Gallery in New York, Yaacov Heller Gallery in Boca Raton, Florida, and Harvest Gallery in Dennis, Massachusetts.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work is evocative of nature in many guises, whether a painting of a sky fragment in various brilliant and subtle colors, a vase of flowers of real or imaginary variety, or the serendipitous results of working in encaustic and seeing where the material leads me. I’ve recently begun to work with soft pastels as well, and have been seduced by the intensity of the colors and the ease of application.

I studied painting with Irving Marantz and Sam Feinstein, and pastels with Peggy Dressel. I studied Art History at Oberlin College, where I majored in music. I moved to NYC after graduation and became a professional musician, a career which I have pursued for the past sixty years. My love of both art and music has given me a rich and satisfying life.