Rick Wester Fine Art is pleased to present the gallery's first two-person exhibition featuring a pair of RWFA artists whose work speaks to each other while remaining vastly different in approach and result. Mary Shah has exhibited with RWFA since 2016 with her first solo exhibition, A Place in Space Where We Both Meet, a group of small scaled paintings inspired by the loss of her brother and dedicated to him. Rick Wester wrote of the exhibition that Shah explores personal loss through the metaphorical depiction of imaginary landscapes and seascapes, creating luminous, atmospheric compositions, laced with spiritual overtones and subtle brushwork.

Rachael Wren had her first solo exhibition in the gallery in 2022 with Still It Grows which introduced her multilayered geometric abstractions based on her own landscape experiences but reworked with an improvisational determination that takes them far from their original forms. In this case, Wester described her work saying that it explores the dichotomy between geometry and landscape, meticulous execution and rationality versus emotion and intuition, depicting space over location. Wren is particularly drawn to moments in nature in which form and space intermingle and are interchangeable.

Working towards a joint exhibition was a natural step for the two colleagues. Although visually, their works are quite opposite in execution and result, they share roots in plein air painting practice. Wren conjures a complex weaving of color and brushstroke, building anticipation through adjacency and contrast, her parameters are hard-edged and relentless in experimentation. Shah is a master blender of delicious cocktails of color and surrealist dissection of animal and plant forms, as if her subjects have bred on a parallel world in a different solar system. As is true with all of nature, their works are redolent with sunlight and come to life with the flavor of the seasons inherent in their creation. 

Shah comments on the efforts towards the exhibition, Since Rachael joined the gallery, I've felt an affinity for her steadfast work ethic and approach towards reaching a final result that could not be pre-visualized. Her improvisatory layering of color speaks directly to my own pursuit of transparent forms but in the opposite direction. 

Wren's thoughts are similar in reflecting on her relationship to Shah's work: Mary and I share many common goals and interests in how to move our art forward. I work hard at reaching the unexpected and finding subtlety in composing my paintings and that is inherent in Mary's paintings - a part of her process- and a major reason I wanted to do this exhibition with her.

The two artists are presenting oil paintings and works on paper, something else they found in common that drew them to working on In the Ecstasy of the Sun. Wren paints mostly on flexible support - canvas or linen as well as paper, but perhaps in a nod to Shah's longtime practice, she is including three oil paintings on paper mounted to panel. Shah's contribution includes her oil on panel abstractions and several new watercolors on paper. It is Shah's watercolor practice that led to her dramatic breakthrough in her oils where she has reached the same level of sublime lightness of touch attained in the watercolors.

RWFA is proud to bring these two accomplished innovators together in the gallery simultaneously becoming for them finally, a place in space where they both meet.