DAVID&SCHWEITZER Contemporary presents Dwellers on the Threshold, which is Mary DeVincentis’ first one-person exhibition at the gallery.
Over the last two decades, DeVincentis has created her work in series such as Sin Eaters and Dark Matters, which are inspired by her study of Buddhism and Western psychology. Her paintings capture a balance between her rich internal landscape and her responses to the contemporary world around her. Her work is created by a wholly original mash-up of Western modernism and post-modernism, classical South Asian and Tibetan traditions, and is always defined by the commonality of the painter’s touch and sensitivity for process and materiality, creating work of a deeply personal iconography that investigates the universal dilemmas and mysteries of existence.
In her most recent series, Dwellers on the Threshold, she has intuitively brought forward and makes contemporary the origins of Victorian Narrative painting founded by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in the late 1840s, during the birth of the Industrial Revolution. This was a time of great cultural and social dislocation borne of new technologies, a time in which one can find parallels with much of the dislocation we feel in this age of meta-information, the growth of A.I. and the blinding speed of the digital revolution.
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood felt it was their role as artists to tell moral tales and they chose subjects which were less idealized than that of their predecessors, and more reflective of the changing world they saw around them. They were a group fascinated by recent scientific discoveries, which appeared to disprove biblical chronology, and by the willingness of scientists to challenge the prevalent beliefs of the era.
In Dwellers on the Threshold, DeVincentis draws on myths emerging from her subconscious and upon art and literature from both east and west to create an open-ended humanist narrative, (less a formal or structured narrative than that of the Pre-Raphaelites); one which contains multiple readings, and which questions individual and collective morality in our time of great unease and dislocation. It is through her complex, beautifully rendered fables that we question who we are and what we believe.
Mary DeVincentis maintains studios in Manhattan and Brooklyn. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Printmaking from St. Martins College of Art in London, UK. Her work has been included in exhibits at Life on Mars Gallery, the International Print Center, the New York Public Library, White Columns, the Brooklyn Museum and most recently inSympathetic Magic, curated by Elisa Decker at Westbeth Gallery and in a group exhibition at the Bo Lee Gallery in London, among numerous others. She is represented by DAVID&SCHWEITZER Contemporary in NY and Gibbons and Nicolas in Dublin, Ireland.
David & Schweitzer Contemporary
56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, New York 11206
Image: Mary DeVincentis “Dweller on the Threshold” (2017, acrylic on yupo on panel, 60? x 48”)
