Through brilliant oranges and moody shades of blue, Los Angeles-based artist Roberta Gentry renders vivid, balanced compositions that, as she says, take the senses seriously. Gentry has long been interested in the relationship between the constructed and the natural, cultivating abstract, biomorphic forms scaffolded by tall columns.
Gravitating toward symmetry and restricted palettes, Gentry paints rhythmic pieces that adhere to an underlying grid. Every painting is the result of multiple layers of thinned acrylic, which build into subtle gradients that dissipate across the canvas.
The paintings shown here are part of that artist’s upcoming solo exhibition, Blood Orange. Lush with color and texture, Gentry’s pieces reference the 16th-century La Dame à la licorne tapestries, comprised of six fiber works featuring a blond, lavishly dressed noblewoman flanked by a unicorn on one side and a lion on the other. Each piece correlates with one of the five senses, with text on the sixth reading “À Mon Seul Désirm,” or “to my only desire.”
While Blood Orange references the tapestries’ bold color palettes, Gentry also renders various elements they depict. The velvet gown the noblewoman wears, a towering pipe organ, and the orange trees anchoring the backdrop become central forms.
Although scholars interpret the tapestries as directly referencing the sense, others take a broader, more nuanced approached. The latter posit that the fiber works speak to how we gather knowledge and information about the world—particularly through the sixth, more mysterious piece related to emotion—and this is another place where Gentry’s interests align. She often considers “how we construct mythologies to interpret and explain our lived experiences,” that emerges on the canvas through a tension between the order of the grid and the roving, unpredictable nature of organic growth.
Blood Orange runs through October 24 at Track 16’s East Hollywood location. Find more from the artist on Instagram.
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