Celia Reisman
Chosen Places

Paul Thiebaud Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Chosen Places, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Philadelphia based artist Celia Reisman, on Saturday, February 17th, with a reception from 3-5pm and an artist talk at 3:30pm.  On view will be eleven paintings and drawings of suburban house-scapes from the artist’s travels across the United States, as well as a new series of works Reisman made during her recent teaching trip to Ireland in the summer of 2023.  Straddling the divide between realism and abstraction, Reisman’s paintings and drawings draw inspiration from and reveal the beauty found in everyday domestic architecture and its arrangement in the landscape.  The exhibition will be on view through April 6, 2024. 

For Celia Reisman, recording memory of a place – the arrangement of buildings, the placement of trees and plants, and the play of light on the scene – is the driving impetus behind the creation of her paintings and drawings.  Inspired by the neighborhood she lives in outside of Philadelphia, as well as her trips to see friends and family throughout the United States and abroad, Reisman’s works in aggregate form a loose diary or journal chronicling her experiences.  Far from the literal depiction of each setting, Reisman reduces details, distorts the proportions of elements, and interprets the colors she sees into the rich hues found on the page or canvas. 

Reisman’s drawings reveal the artist’s thought process in creating a composition.  With their graphite lines visible through the carefully applied watercolor, each work contains the spatial compression of perspective and isolation of elements that have become defining characteristics of all her mature works.  Both the paintings and drawings recall the works of early 20th century American Regionalists Milton Avery and Thomas Hart Benton in their abstracted sense of representation and pared down forms.  Reisman’s works also have ties to the post-impressionist Nabis painters from late 19th century France in their use of flat areas of color. 

Born in Syracuse, NY, Celia Reisman grew up in Cleveland Heights, OH, and studied painting at Carnegie-Mellon University (BFA 1971).  She later earned her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1978.  She has been the recipient of numerous awards, grants, and residencies, including the 2001 Leeway Foundation – Window of Opportunity Award; the 2004 Rochefort-en-Terre Painting Residency in Brittany, France; the 2009 Hassan, Speicher, Betts, and Symons Fund Purchase from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the 2015 Borgo Finocchieto Residency in Buonconvento, Italy.  Celia Reisman’s paintings have been exhibited across the United States and can be found in numerous corporate and private collections.  Chosen Places is Celia Reisman’s third solo exhibition with Paul Thiebaud Gallery.