Ruth Mordecai
Oil paintings and works on paper
4 Terrace Lane, Gloucester
open by appointment or chance
617 462 9171
www.ruthmordecai.com
Ruth Mordecai's work is expressive and abstract and makes reference to landscape, biblical story, figure and symbol. It has a broad range of colors and sculptural references. Her early training was as a sculptor. The black gestural line in the work evolved from a series of works in steel. Her two dimensional works range in size from 15" x 11" to 6' x 8' and consists of collages and paintings on canvas and paper. Ruth attended Bennington College and then received both her BFA and MFA from Boston University School for the Arts in Boston, MA. There she majored in sculpture and spent many years working from the figure. She thought that her artistic life would be spent with the structural and gestural forms of the figure, but the more her work evolved into gesture...the more abstract it became. She has been working as a painter since 1998. Her work is in major public and private collections including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Wiggin Prints and Drawings Department of the Boston Public Library. The library owns 30 of her works on paper. Her work is included in Fixing the World, Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century, by Ori Soltes, Brandeis University Press, 2003. She is represented by Soprafina Gallery in Boston, MA
"To my mind there are few if any American artists as acutely attuned as she is, or better endowed imaginatively and technically, to address certain issues of real import"..."Ruth Mordecai is exploring in strictly contemporary visual idiom the large and perennial human questions--philosophical and religious questions, the question of the human community and our shared symbols." Dr. Roger Lipsey, author of An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art (Shambala Publishers)
Jacob's Ladder (Dream Series)
Acrylic and oil on gessoed 100% rag paper, mounted on panel
38" x 29"
Apples Hanging from the Sun
Oil on canvas, 55" x 42"