Alexandria Tarver

Deli Gallery is pleased to present New Paintings - Nights, Alexandria Tarver’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

For this new series, Tarver expands her familiar imagery of achromatic foliage—both in scale and intensity—by depicting dynamic and whimsical compositions of flowers against dark night skies. Through her laborious and durational process, Tarver builds up multiple layers of golden-hued blossoms that have come to symbolize herself and the people in her life after initially using floral imagery in paintings as a vehicle to process the grief from her father’s death in 2014. The exhibition coincides with the 7th anniversary of his passing.

Tarver’s ephemeral scenes, developed from drawings of flowers passed-by and experienced in life, now depict moments of bloom flourished by the mesmerizing colors in the ever-changing New York City evening sky. Here one finds a notation of the deep purples, blacks, and twilight blues which envelop us all at the day’s end. The artist allows this night sky to act as a character of its own within the works. Together in a bouquet with the body-toned flowers in the foreground, each surface becomes energized by this sense of self-acknowledged presence in temporal space.

These herbaceous arrangements, and the many loved ones and moments they constitute, are created through a ritualistic and subtle application of oil paint, pastel and pencil markings. Compositions in several of the works more closely reflect the drawings from which they stem, allowing a more frenetic energy to imbue the series of works when taken as a whole. Tarver’s careful consideration of pigment, sense, and texture creates a playful dance of characters unmoored from botanic realism.

Like the feeling of being moved by an array of constellations (notably absent in the true city skies), Tarver’s enigmatic compositions push and pull viewers from the center to the poised edges of the panels’ plane. Through a delicate balance of negative space, detailed brushwork and direct markings, the artist imbues each painting with relentless, perennial tension.

Alexandria Tarver received a BFA from New York University in 2011. Recently her work has been exhibited at Auxier Kline (2020), Arsenal Gallery, NY (2019), Et. Al. etc., San Francisco (2017), Danziger Gallery, NY (2016), Oceans Eleven curated by Billy Sullivan (2015), Violet’s Café in Brooklyn (2015) and Material Art Fair, Mexico City (2016). Tarver had her first solo exhibition with Deli Gallery in 2015. She lives and works in New York City.