Jane Richlovsky
"With their almost cinematic focus upon loaded symbolic objects in middle-class, mid-century suburban settings – a pink cake, an orange mound of jello, a woman’s large, foreshortened hand with bright red nail-polish – these paintings are remarkable for their muteness and suppressed emotion …
Richlovsky’s decorative splendor here is not unlike that of Van Eyck and other Northern Renaissance painters.”
Richlovsky’s decorative splendor here is not unlike that of Van Eyck and other Northern Renaissance painters.”
Jim Demetre, Artdish, April 26, 2006
"Jane Richlovsky's paintings have been exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the United States, including the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington; A Shenere Velt Gallery in Los Angeles; The Painting Center in New York City; Heineman-Myers Contemporary Art in Bethesda, Maryland; and Atelier 31 Gallery, the Seattle Art Museum Rental/Sales Gallery, Pratt Fine Arts Center, and Ballard-Fetherston Gallery in Seattle. She is the recipient of grants from the George Sugarman Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, the King County Arts Commission, and Artist Trust. Her work has been featured in FiberArts magazine, and is included in the collection of the King County International Airport and in private collections throughout the world.
More information and images may be found at her web site, www.janerichlovsky.com.
Artist's Statement
Before they became paintings, the pieces of fabric I paint on had lives of their own. They were tablecloths, curtains, slipcovers and other domestic ephemera. I leave their floral, polka-dotted and paisley surfaces partially revealed as people's clothing or objects, using painted shadows and reflections to merge them physically, visually and metaphorically with their environments.
I mine mid-century advertisements, cookbooks and homemaking guides for images of people, food and appliances, refashioning them into oblique narratives whose characters are cropped off the edges of the canvases, frozen in moments of interaction with the shiny, textured surfaces that surround them. I see the sensuality and beauty in these surfaces – a marbled vinyl floor or a translucent, wriggling jello salad – and painstakingly build up layers of oil paint in an attempt to render them in all their mid-century glory. By focusing on the seductiveness of manufactured objects, I explore how the lingering desire for the American Dream, in all its suburban nuclear excess, is in essence a sexual one. I twist the perpetually nostalgic visual language of advertising to bring to the surface the underlying uneasiness of this idealized dream world.
In constructions inspired by magazine advertisements of the 1950s, I often attach squares of painted patterns to the images, which contradict, reinforce or parody their ambiguous narratives. The relationship between the surfaces of the fabrics and the stories I paint on top of them shifts continually between flatness and the illusion of depth. The patterned surfaces underlying the images bind the figures inextricably to their surroundings, the physical objects of their times and places. Whether they are liberating themselves from the strictures of the patterns they are made of, or binding themselves more tightly to them, I leave to the viewer.
Before they became paintings, the pieces of fabric I paint on had lives of their own. They were tablecloths, curtains, slipcovers and other domestic ephemera. I leave their floral, polka-dotted and paisley surfaces partially revealed as people's clothing or objects, using painted shadows and reflections to merge them physically, visually and metaphorically with their environments.
I mine mid-century advertisements, cookbooks and homemaking guides for images of people, food and appliances, refashioning them into oblique narratives whose characters are cropped off the edges of the canvases, frozen in moments of interaction with the shiny, textured surfaces that surround them. I see the sensuality and beauty in these surfaces – a marbled vinyl floor or a translucent, wriggling jello salad – and painstakingly build up layers of oil paint in an attempt to render them in all their mid-century glory. By focusing on the seductiveness of manufactured objects, I explore how the lingering desire for the American Dream, in all its suburban nuclear excess, is in essence a sexual one. I twist the perpetually nostalgic visual language of advertising to bring to the surface the underlying uneasiness of this idealized dream world.
In constructions inspired by magazine advertisements of the 1950s, I often attach squares of painted patterns to the images, which contradict, reinforce or parody their ambiguous narratives. The relationship between the surfaces of the fabrics and the stories I paint on top of them shifts continually between flatness and the illusion of depth. The patterned surfaces underlying the images bind the figures inextricably to their surroundings, the physical objects of their times and places. Whether they are liberating themselves from the strictures of the patterns they are made of, or binding themselves more tightly to them, I leave to the viewer.
Jane Richlovsky