ANDREW RAFACZ is pleased to announce Invitations, a solo exhibition of new paintings from Jessie Edelman in Gallery One. The exhibition opens Friday, April 14th and continues through Saturday, May 27th, 2023. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

With Invitations, Jessie Edelman presents a series of new paintings that continue to depict her vibrant, bountiful interiors amidst the backdrop of lush, exotic locales.

Although her recent paintings have no direct representation of human figure, her layered mises-en-scène feel absolutely ‘lived-in.’ One can imagine people occupying these spaces in myriad states of recreation and joy—stretched out on one of her well-appointed chairs or cutting a slice of cake.

Edelman has always been a daydreamer, and her paintings are a very personal expression of this exercise. It is no surprise that they evoke spaces where daydreaming would certainly occur. There is also a synchronous level of daydreaming inherent in her act of moving paint around the canvas. Her works feel rendered by someone who would be in the scenes she’s depicting. In this way, there is a return—by way of paint itself—- to the idea of bounty that the artist intends on putting forth.

This visual and ontological generosity extends to the edges of her paintings. Borders that pattern and festoon the interior’s proceedings, evoke a multiplicity of being—the viewer is brought simultaneously into the existence of the narrative and the painting itself. Their designs recall the imagery of both Henri Matisse and Emilio Pucci, while playing with notions of craft and mass-produced decoration.

Some of the works in the exhibition revisit techniques the artist has not used recently. In several of them, the sharp, thick impasto gives way to more gestural brush strokes and a washed application, referencing the colorful and fluid abstract expressionism of Helen Frankenthaler. These bold shifts in painterly technique add to the dynamic scenarios that Edelman depicts and further reinforce her muti-layered perspective.

The seemingly simple title of this exhibition references festivity, travel, good will and recreation; but it also is a nod to the compositional framework of the paintings themselves. Much like souvenir postcards, they boldly announce their intentions and invite the viewer to be part of the experience.

JESSIE EDELMAN (American, b. 1986) lives and works in New York. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include Denny Dimin Gallery (New York, NY) and a two-person exhibition (with David Humphrey) at The Suburban (Milwaukee, WI). Recent group exhibitions include Denny Dimin Gallery (Hong Kong), 0.0 Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), Dirimart (Istanbul, Turkey), Paula Estey Gallery (Newburyport, MA), Bahamas Biennale (Detroit, MI), Anahita Art Gallery (Tehran, Iran), and Circuit 12 Contemporary (Dallas, TX). She has exhibited at art fairs in Miami, Aspen, San Francisco and Kyoto. The gallery will present her paintings at NADA New York this coming May. She has been reviewed or featured in The New York Times, i-D Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Vice, Brooklyn Magazine, Artnet News, and Vogue. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections. This is her third solo exhibition with the gallery.