hpgrp GALLERY NY is pleased to announce the opening of Leda’s Daughter, an exhibition of new paintings by Rene Lynch. These large-scale works present gorgeous women communing with animals in fantastic landscapes of stormy skies and over-scaled roses. These paintings are an expression of Lynch’s life as a woman and an artist, as well as an invitation into her dream world. They are lush with color, romantic, and unapologetically operatic, the manifestations of Lynch’s conviction that she “paints because she breathes.”

Lynch cites numerous sources of inspiration in the work, including the 1948 film The Red Shoes—which is about a ballet dancer who gives everything for her craft much in the same way that Lynch gives everything for her art—as well as tragic and powerful feminist icons; such as the late contemporary artists Pina Bausch and Amy Winehouse, and Joan of Arc, Icarus and Artemis, the magic realism of Japanese anime and the twin concepts of beauty and death depicted in 17^th century Dutch Still Life painting.

Referring to the works as self portraits and an “attempt to define a raw truth about women’s creative ambition and sexual energy”, Lynch depicts figures that are more goddesses than they are humans, sporting crowns of gold and plush wings of snow-white feathers, along with other accouterments of wealth, beauty, magical powers, and suffering. They are surrounded by Lynch’s own personal avatars—crows for their cleverness, cats for their sensuality, swans for their fierceness and vulnerability—which offer a glimpse into Lynch’s own psyche, as well as the pathology of her drive as an artist, which like the fairytale of The Red Shoes, she will never be able to cure.

Rene Lynch’s art has been widely exhibited around the world, and has been featured in publications such as The New York Times, Art and Antiques, The Washington Post, Bunte, Oxford American and American Art Collector. This is her second solo exhibition at hpgrp GALLERY NEW YORK following her 2007 exhibitions in New York and Tokyo. Recent solo exhibitions include; Galerie Kaysser in Munich Germany in 2011, 2008, and 2007, and Jenkins Johnson Gallery NYC and San Francisco in 2009, 2008, and 2007. Recent museum exhibitions include her solo Gaze at Galerie Künstlade in Zittau, Germany in 2008, and major works exhibited at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, 2006, and the Hunterdon Museum, Clifton, NJ, 2007 and 2005. Lynch studied painting, art history, and critical theory at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has been awarded numerous fellowships including; P.S.1 Museum, NYC, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Oberpfalzer Künstlerhaus, Germany. 

A painter of poetic dreams, Rene Lynch follows no one’s path but her own. Celebrated for her images of adolescent girls communing with nature or caught in a mediated gaze, Lynch possesses the power to portray women in mythical, fairy tale realms that simultaneously reveal her subject’s vulnerabilities and strengths. Mixing sensuous female figures with idyllic animals in lush landscapes, Lynch creates romantic visions of psychological situations, seen through a painterly lens.

After years of representing symbolic others through composite images of studio sitters, figures culled from the Internet, and magazine tear sheets, the artist now turns a penetrating eye on herself for a dynamic, new body of work, which she’s titled Leda’s Daughter.

“These paintings are self-portraits…not at all in the literal sense of likenesses, but in the sense that I am exploring the dark corners and grand vistas of my own psyche as it pertains to my life as an artist and a woman,” says Lynch. “These images are highly romantic and unapologetically operatic. They are an invitation into my dream world.”

The canvas Red Shoes, which draws inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale and the eponymous 1948 classic film, suggests the obsessive nature of the creative process, and provides the best jumping off point for the show. A topless, young dancer in a revealing, sheer tutu stands on point in red, ballet shoes that hug the neck of a bloodied, dying swan. Gigantic flowers, surrounding the dancer, enchantingly transport her from film, stage, and book to the realm of reverie that places her in the middle of an imagined darkly seductive still life. War of the Roses—the largest painting in the show—offers two temptresses caught high in blustery clouds and equally deep in a field of exaggerated blooms. The opposing female forces represent good and evil as they face off in a metaphoric battle for the artist’s soul. The goddess of good draws back a bow and arrow, symbolic of a powerful life force, to combat a dark princess, who’s joined by an almost hidden black cat while summoning an ominous flock of shadowy crows to her defense. Twins presents a crowned, chained ballerina—surrounded by roses—lovingly embracing her counterpart, a deer. Her skin-tone and skirt color match the deer’s warm-brown coat—turning the young buck into an avatar for a sensuously shared-spirit. Turning Point sets a delicate dancer atop a carrousel horse that’s floating in the clouds. Wielding a warrior’s sword, with her crown dipping to the point of nearly falling off, the dangerous damsel gets sheltered by a swooping, white owl, as she recovers from battle. Another dramatic contrast of light and dark, the canvas Leda’s Daughter, depicts a winged femme fatale in a billowing white dress, holding an abundant bouquet of purple roses. Set against a wintry sky, she twists her body in a defensive, animal-like pose and disarmingly casts a startled gaze.  Swan Prisoner  portrays a winged, martyred princess encompassed by stormy skies that are full of rescuing swans. Crowned, blindfolded, and chained, the wounded noble is shackled to the Earth, even as the passing flock beckons her to the heavens above.

Sumptuously painted in oils—wet-on-wet to keep the colors velvety and artistic juices flowing— Lynch’s canvases are composed of abstract marks and just enough naturalism to make them totally believable. A master of creative techniques and a colorful interpreter of imaginative scenes, Lynch makes paintings that transcend everyday life, while intuitively constructing characters and symbolic settings that reflect it.

- Paul Laster,  January 2012

Paul Laster is the editor of A+, a Blog by Artspace.com, and a contributing editor at Flavorpill.com, ArtBahrain.org, and ArtAsiaPacific magazine, as well as a frequent contributor to Time Out New York, Art in America, Modern Painters, New York Observer, ArtPulse, Artnet.com, TheDailyBeast.com, and Whitehot.com.

Leda’s Daughter     - Rene Lynch, 2011-12

In the iconic film The Red Shoes, the character of the impresario Boris Lermontov asks the dancer Vicky “Why do you dance?” She answers without hesitation “Why do you live?”

I paint because I breathe. It is who and what I am. The metaphor of the Red Shoes is a good touchstone for this new body of work. As Paul Brunick has written; “The ballerina Vicky gives herself fully to the “terrifying and transporting power of the red shoes…. a supremely perverse celebration of the artistic drive as a kind of pathology for which there is no cure.” These paintings attempt to define a raw truth about women’s creative ambition and sexual energy which I believe lies somewhere between the twin aspects of tragedy and power as symbolically manifested by the work and lives of the late contemporary figures Pina Bausch and Amy Winehouse. I’m inspired by tales of queens, ill fated warriors and crazy faithful mystics, those with magical powers, heroines, and victims of their convictions; Joan of Arc, Ophelia, Icarus, Judith and Artemis.

Painting intuitively, I skirt a razor's edge of kitsch imagery and art historical references, employing recognizable and filmic tropes while meshing together personal interpretations of feminist icons, myths and fairytales, and a rapturous relationship to the natural world. These paintings are in no way intended to be specific narratives but instead, like the surrealism of Japanese anime, open a window to a magic reality, allowing an open ended and associative response. Over the years certain animals have emerged as my personal avatars, in this series, the swan, for it’s beauty and dual nature of fierceness and vulnerability. Some of the inspiration has come from an intoxication with Dutch still lifes from the 16th  and 17th century, with their depictions of gorgeous blooms presented in over abundance, crawling with lizards, beetles and the beginnings of decay. That poignant moment of the realization of the cosmic balance between beauty, ambition and death is at the center of the creative drive and these current works. Beauty and dreams have taken a beating but still we must dance on…. and this dance of life and death is what sustains us.