Jeff Bailey Gallery is pleased to present Rachel Schmidhofer: Photosynesthesia, an exhibition of new paintings.
Schmidhofer’s full throttle paintings of house plants (and fish tanks and display cases) can invoke a cross-sensory experience: a viewer's eyes might be stimulated to feel a jar or a pot instead of just recognizing a rendering of a pot.
Using pared-down building blocks – color and line, light and shadow - the wet-into-wet paintings allow the brain to complete a circuit of recognition, while leaving space for the eye to roam. Vision stimulates a tactile/perceptual response, and the paintings seem to flip atmospherically between 2D and 3D, representation and abstraction.
Rachel Schmidhofer received an MFA from Yale University (2011) and a BFA from Washington University (2008). She has had solo exhibitions at Novella Gallery, New York and Glike Gallery, Los Angeles. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Zurcher Gallery, New York and Gallery Poulsen, Copenhagen. In 2014, with Jennifer Coates, she co-curated Tossed, the gallery’s first group exhibition in Hudson. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.