Bianca Nemelc

Ross + Kramer is pleased to present the opening of Bianca Nemelc’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, The Valley of Many-Colored Grass.

Nemelc is a New York City-based figurative painter whose work centers around relationships between the female form and the natural world.The exhibition features four new paintings in which the artist explores moments of unity between woman and nature. This body of work encapsulates and celebrates even the most brief instances of synthesis with nature.

Water is an enduring presence in Nemelc’s work, here taking the form of delicate blue washes and clouds that populate the backgrounds. These landscapes speak to the experience of nature within the context of New York—a nod to the artist’s upbringing along the Hudson River—and assert that wherever and in whatever form nature exists, there also exists the opportunity to access the freedom and harmony that it affords.

Despite their intimacy and vulnerability, Nemelc’s figures maintain an unapologetic ownership of their bodies and the space that they inhabit. The vignettes that the artist creates, while minimal in their form, carry an abundance of women’s stories, histories, and contemporary issues.

The exhibition’s title is drawn from Eleonora, a romantic short story by Edgar Allen Poe, wherein the author describes a heavenly, secluded landscape in which he falls in love and loses love.

"We had always dwelled together, beneath a tropical sun, in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. No unguided footstep ever came upon that vale; for it lay away up among a range of giant hills that hung beetling around about it, shutting out the sunlight from its sweetest recesses. No path was trodden in its vicinity; and, to reach our happy home, there was need of putting back, with force, the foliage of many thousands of forest trees, and of crushing to death the glories of many millions of fragrant flowers. Thus it was that we lived all alone, knowing nothing of the world without the valley…"