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SIMONE SINSLEY - ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO - 25 MARCH 2000

Exhibition Of Paintings By Sharon Gee - Collins Fine Art, Chicago, USA

Timeless Visions

The fifty paintings British artist Sharon Gee brings to her first US solo show in Chicago attest to a prolific and fast growing international career. Employing design in its simplest forms, Gee's images invite viewers to share boundless pictorial spaces inspired by nature. Her compositions draw from natural phenomena the motifs, patterns, textures, and colors she communicates through suggestive rather than representational pictures. Color is the central force of the artist's creative process, charging her work with symbolic meaning, and giving her paintings a physical presence that closes the distance between mind and matter, eye and spirit.

In her landscapes, monochromatic paintings, and still lifes, Gee creates designs that are both abstract and referential - avoiding the false dichotomy between abstraction and figuration, that underlined much of twentieth century art. Her compositions are not a second degree mirror that simply reflect reality, they are pictorial actualities that in a bold yet vulnerable style, explore traces of time in space.

At the beginning of a new century, Gee's images, at once ancient and modern, timeless and contemporary, communicate feelings in a scale that is paradoxically heroic and intimate, simple and majestic. Here, viewers will find fullness in empty spaces, and depth on surfaces, as the artist gives form to life's eternal dualities. At the dawn of the Modernist movement in 1863, Charles Baudelaire reminded us of the complimentary presence of dualities in art: "By 'modernity' I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable." The simple, direct vision of this artist who embraces painting without intellectual posture, should surprise and delight both the general public and collectors alike.

S Sinsley
Art Historian and Critic
Professor of Modern & Contemporary Art/School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, March 25, 2000
Copyright © 2001 Sharon Gee