Michele Mirisola

Michele Mirisola May 14-July 23, 2016

Kathy McCarver Root and her gallery, KMR Arts, proudly present the gallery’s newest exhibition, “Room”, paintings by Michele Mirisola. The
exhibition will open with a reception with the artist on Saturday, May 14, from 4-6 pm and will continue until July 23, 2016.

Michele Mirisola is a New York born and based artist. The paintings in “Room” are a series of works focusing on Mirisola’s studio and pieces from all of the rooms she has lived in during the past three years. For any artist who has a dedicated studio space to work in, it is the place where the artist creates, escapes, explores, and breathes. It is a most personal space, essentially more of a home than the artist’s actual home. Although the elements in Mirisola’s paintings are familiar: a table, a chair, a bookcase, the viewer senses that Mirisola is showing them a private, intimate world. Mirisola’s pictures are full of memory, imbued with impressions of the people who have sat in the chairs, had conversations, shared moments. The colors in Mirisola’s paintings reference Matisse or Van Gogh, but her paintings are completely modern in
their slightly messy, yet ultimately ordered composition, a kind of Figurative Expressionism. Mirisola says about the paintings, “The spaces allow me to concentrate on the idea other than the figure. Having a person in these paintings would be distracting.” McCarver Root says, “There is a youthful energy that runs through Mirisola’s paintings, and I thought it would be interesting to bring the urban focus of
Brooklyn to rural KMR Arts.” A recent article by Lee Escobedo about Mirisola’s work describes the paintings
in “Room”:  “Mirisola’s work is an investigation into our memories of time and place – how a space can influence our emotions. Within a place where we create, disarm ourselves, our memories can slip through our fingers, taking various forms and truths. Chairs bleed in and out of perspective, sometimes just a cross-section of legs hovering above the floor. This technique is reminiscent of how one fills out details when reflecting on a memory: half of a table here, a part of a sofa there, floating hands. These delicate paintings are traced with the ghosts of Matisse, yet stand alone as diary-like entries of a singular hand.”

Michele Mirisola says, “I’m fascinated by the moment when objects touch one another, like chair legs on a floor, the moment the paint stroke delineates weight.”

The exhibition at KMR Arts will also feature work from Mirisola’s series, “Tender”. The paintings in Tender are small-scale intimate images of nude women painted directly onto dollar bills. Some of the models are Mirisola’s friends, other women were found by the artist while researching the politics of internet porn and examining how women of color are depicted differently than white women. These works are diminutive yet they have a powerful presence. Mirisola says of the “Tender” pieces, “I can’t plan too much while I am painting them because they are so small. They are made on dollars in my pocket, and the subjects are from images I’ve found on the internet, my friends and models. As I have refined this work, I have begun to find figures from other sources such as Balthus, Lucien Freud, and Lisa Yuskavage.” Appealing to both the established collector and the first time buyer, KMR Arts continues to celebrate photography. Kathy McCarver Root is a photography dealer, working with individual and corporate clients to purchase and install fine art photography. McCarver Root gained her experience over two decades while working as a photography editor for books (Lillian Bassman, Bulfinch, Weekend Retreats, Rizzoli) and prestigious magazines (Esquire, US Weekly, and InStyle). Kathryn McCarver Root named one of Litchfield County’s 50 Most
Influential People by Litchfield Magazine. For more information, call: (860) 868-7533, email: info@kmrarts.com or visit our website: www.kmrarts.com