Mara De Luca | Lead Me Through the Dawn

Quint Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Mara De Luca. The exhibition will open in our Gallery A with a Morning Stop on Saturday, October 1st from 10am – 1pm. The artist will be in attendance and the exhibition is open to the public.

In 2009, De Luca embarked on a cycle of paintings inspired by Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross. In her series, De Luca was invoking the tenants of modernist art history and employing her own abstract techniques to the paintings. As Newman captured “streaks of light” in his zips, De Luca captures the atmosphere of contemporary light and color derived from varying visual sources such as advertisement and mass media, conflating modernist abstraction with contemporary illusionism and sensational effects.

This new station series, titled Lead Me Though the Dawn, similarly presents a narrative that runs through fourteen paintings; with this work, the artist directly addresses more personal themes of love, heartbreak, renewal and beauty. On a much smaller scale, the 14 by 11 inch paintings offer a variety of techniques including oil on canvas, poured acrylic on canvas, oil on panel, cut canvas over metal and polished aluminum. The imagery reflects a personal lexicon, displaying influences varying from Tiepolo to Dior and Marc Jacobs fashion advertisements, to the ballet “Giselle.” Music and dance take a powerful hold, as the images, alternating between extremes of figuration and abstraction, fine brushwork and accidental pours, read like a visual progression of deep emotions, melody and style.

Mara De Luca is originally from Washington, D.C., and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. De Luca received an MFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA, and BA from Columbia University, New York. De Luca was part of the CERCA Series at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 2010 displaying her Stations series and has been part of several nationally exhibited solo and group presentations.