Marcel Sitcoske Gallery is proud to present our second solo show of new work by Bay Area abstract painter Linda Geary. This exhibition signals a major departure for Geary as her canvases come alive with bold color where they had previously been restricted primarily to colors found in nature.

For this body of work, Geary has looked back to the Renaissance to structure her compositions, while her colors and textures reflect the shiny, eye-catching aesthetics of fashion, advertising and contemporary material culture. She has used works by Giotto, Tintoretto, El Greco, and Bellini, among others as compositional models, structuring some of her paintings after specific examples, such as "Mantegna's Meadow" (60 x 72 inches) after Mantegna's "Agony in the Garden." The paintings she chooses often have weighty biblical or mythological subject matter. Her colors, however, are far from classical. Taken directly from lipstick and nail polish shades featured in Vogue and other fashion magazines, they refer more directly to the everyday world around us. They are bright, sensuous, playful, slick, inviting, and commercially manufactured. They provide a contrast to the works' grandiose compositional antecedents.

In her use of different media, Geary also explores the relationship between old and new, organic and industrial. She uses oil paint, resin and wax which are smeared, poured, dripped, and brushed onto her surfaces. Dull, cloudy patches of wax play against the smooth, shiny veneer of resin mixed with pigment. Oil paint takes many forms. Thickly applied in some areas with wrinkled skin, it tapers into thin washes, and appears in numerous manifestations in between. The scale of her work is also intriguing as she balances large, monumental paintings such as "Monarch" (72 x 60 inches) with smaller, bite-size, candy-coated jewels, the smallest being 4 x 4 inches.
With this new body of work, Linda Geary proves that it is possible to create new forms of abstraction that are at once linked to tradition, but look straight ahead to the future.