NEW YORK, NY.- Evening in America is Edie Nadelhaft's second solo show with the gallery. This new group of road-trip paintings picks up where her last series, Big Country (2017) left off. Evening in America focuses on the visual nuances and psychological ambiguity of twilight. Nadelhaft states, "There is a dreamy, magical and off-times haunted quality to this work that showcases otherwise unremarkable, pedestrian and distinctly American settings." Nadelhaft draws inspiration from artists, writers and filmmakers whose work explores the subtler (and often stranger) corners of the American experience, including David Lynch, Diane Arbus, Donna Tartt, and Walker Evans, whose 1974 comment about his own process sums it up nicely: "I lean toward the enchantment, the visual power of the aesthetically rejected subject."
An avid motorcyclist, Nadelhaft takes annual weeks-long tours of the country's lesser-known and less spectacular outposts collecting sketches, photos and memories that form the basis for her paintings of settings that hover between the built world and the natural landscape. No people are pictured, but each composition preserves some residue of the human presence: clouds gather over a neglected highway in northern Michigan; a signpost flashes by in a mysterious sequence of three small paintings depicting what might quite possibly be the literal end of the earth; the artist's home base of New York City makes a cameo appearance in a triptych painting of a shuttered Luna Park shown at that magical impasse between day and night when the first few stars appear in the still-blue sky. Read more
Edie Nadelhaft studied painting and art history at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA & SUNY at Purchase, NY, and received a BFA with honors from Massachusetts College of Art & Design, Boston, MA. Her work has been exhibited at art fairs, museums and galleries throughout the US, and internationally in Taiwan, Shanghai and Basel, Switzerland. Nadelhaft's work is in the permanent collections of The Ford Foundation, (New York, NY) The University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, (Albuquerque, NM) and Falconworks Theatre for Social Change, (Red Hook, NY) among others. Edie Nadelhaft lives and works in New York City, and has been represented by Lyons Wier Gallery since 2013.