Continuing through September 30, 2017
It would be damn-near-impossible for an aesthetic detective to pin down Eva Speer’s stylistic fingerprint. Over the last decade-plus, the artist [no relation to the critic—Ed.] has created wildly divergent but equally powerful bodies of work in media as disparate as wood, metallic leaf, cast resin, acrylic sculpture, and oil paint. A Pacific Northwest native who in recent years has lived in Amsterdam, Speer returns to oil painting in these nine new works that comprise “Outrageous Fortune.” All are markedly more impressionistic than those in previous series, which tended to break up hyperrealistic main images with color fields that underlined the artifice of object-making.
The current works offer no such conceptual remove. Instead, in pieces like “Lump in the Throat,” “Darling,” and “You Thought,” she sets forth visions of roses, flowing water, and patterns, respectively, which, by way of guilt-free hedonistic opticality, invite the viewer’s eye to wander rather than focus. In a similar fashion to minimalist music, the paintings provide a backdrop for open-ended contemplation — for lying back and floating on waves of pure stimulus until we arrive at a destination chosen not by our minds, but by the unconscious.
