Sydney Licht

The Pocket Gallery

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to present an upcoming exhibition of new paintings by Sydney Licht titled, Duly Noted. This is her ninth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Sydney Licht paints intimate still lifes in bright, jewel-like colors, carefully arranging everyday objects into balanced, almost architectural compositions. Flowers, boxes, bags, vases, matchbooks, and other familiar items are distilled into basic geometric forms and built into arrangements that rise above a tabletop reduced to a thin sliver of color. Working with a palette knife and generous amounts of paint, Licht emphasizes the materiality of the medium, creating richly textured surfaces where objects and backgrounds become equally important.

In the newest group of paintings, Licht further simplifies her subjects, often to the point where they are barely recognizable. Her palette shifts between bright, citrusy colors and softer, pastel tones, while lush backgrounds of color and pattern surround and sometimes merge with objects themselves. Increasingly, her attention turns to the relationships between color, form, and the spaces around them. As she explains, “More than ever, I am interested in how the color of empty space can influence the humble items portrayed on a two-dimensional surface. As always, my goal is to push the limits of what a still life can be by questioning the boundaries between abstraction and figuration.”

Sydney Licht has exhibited across the United States, including a 2022 solo exhibition at the Zillman Art Museum in Bangor, Maine. Group exhibitions include those at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Memorial Art Gallery Museum of the University of Rochester and as well as at numerous commercial galleries nationwide. She was a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Grant, a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, a Yaddo Residency Fellowship, and has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome on three occasions, most recently in November 2023. Her work has been reviewed in The Chicago Tribune , The Chicago Sun-Times and by Jerry Saltz for New York Magazine. Sydney Licht lives and works in New York City and is represented by Kathryn Markel Fine Arts.