Getting from One Place to Another: Recent Paintings by Gerri Rachins

EXHIBITION DATES: March 4 - March 29, 2025

Opening RECEPTION: Thursday, march 6, 5 - 8

Closing RECEPTION: Saturday, march 29, 4 - 6 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to present Getting from One Place to Another, a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Boston-based painter Gerri Rachins, on view March 4-29, 2025. The gallery will host an opening reception with the artist on Thursday, March 6, 5-8 pm.

This solo exhibition features 27 paintings, organic abstractions-most Flashe and acrylic ink on paper-created in 2023-24. The work is organized into what curator Barbara O'Brien calls "trios, pairs, and stand-alones." Some connections are based on sympathetic palettes; often the groupings are meant to showcase the rapport between painting and drawing that is such a distinctive aspect of Rachins' vocabulary. In her catalogue essay "Thinking About the Wind," O'Brien writes:

"The compositions have a solidity, a sculptural implication that at times approaches figuration with forms that bend back upon themselves as they seem to give way to gravity: the suggestion of a torso in Heavy Metal Ballerina; perhaps a head in The Boundary Between the Core and the Mantle. Looking once, the shapes seem sculptural and ancient, glyphs from a world that refuses to be forgotten or that appears unbidden in our collective psyches. Looking again, they seem to be made of light captured, weightless, and quite ephemeral."

The exhibition title, Getting from One Place to Another, is taken from the pages of the Science section of the New York Times, which Rachins peruses each week. According to Rachins, "The polarity between external surrounding and internal thoughts provided source material for my recent paintings. My art is often an investigation into answers to existential questions. The studio is a sanctuary where I attempt to sort out some of these questions. I use colors, shapes, and lines in abstract compositions to explore the illusion of a visually ordered space that is often intentionally disrupted."

About the titles of the exhibition and paintings, Carl Little writes in his catalogue essay, "Rachins' sometimes startling titles add a layer of possibility to our interpretations. We may see an aqueous creature in Local Water Nymph or a dancer responding to Iron Maiden in Heavy Metal Ballerina. That's fine, but in the end, each is a spirited abstraction. Rachins's lines twist and turn, like nerve fibers in a brain scan, leading the eye this way and that until we succumb to the abstract rhythm."

Gerri Rachins (b. 1955, Brookline, MA) is an American artist, living and working in Boston and Cape Cod. She taught for twenty years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and was also a faculty member at Massachusetts College of Art and Design for over a decade. She studied at the New York Studio School while earning a BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. In 2001, she earned an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art working in painting, drawing, and printmaking. Rachins' large-scale drawings are included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA. Her works are held in numerous corporate and private collections in the United States and Europe including Fidelity Investments, Bain Capital, and Berkshire Partners, Boston and Neiman Marcus, Inc., Dallas. In the Boston area, Rachins works are represented by Mobilia Gallery, Cambridge, which hosted a twenty-year retrospective in 2022 to celebrate their long-standing association. She is represented in New York by The Painting Center, where she has presented three solo exhibitions prior to Getting from One Place to Another.

A full-color catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition, featuring essays by O'Brien and noted art historian Carl Little. O'Brien's past positions have included Chief Curator and Executive Director, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; Editor-in-Chief, Art New England Magazine, and Director of the Trustman Art Gallery at Simmons University.