Meghan Brady

Mrs. is pleased to present A Curtain, Not a Door, Meghan Brady’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. For this expansive presentation, Brady’s new paintings will be displayed in two parts: the first opening March 16 at Mrs. Maspeth, NY, with the exhibition’s companion opening March 30 at Dunes, Portland, ME.

Like the sinking light of late afternoon, advancing between the forest’s dark trunks and limbs—a light that seems to observe as well as illuminate—Maine-based painter Meghan Brady’s recent work exerts a radiance that is both forthcoming and secretive.

Curved, rhythmic shapes welcome the viewer in Brady’s compositions, as open as a hand extended in generosity. Sequences of musical angles pinion upwards from horizontal to diagonal to vertical, arching forms hug bigger and smaller contours, and sweet hits of color move from barely-distinguishable values to richly saturated contrasting hues. In No Such Light, reds shift to pinks shift to whites, the analogous palette noisily embracing harmony. Smaller works, such as Wrong Number and Dogs Agree, use opacity to create both image and aperture, modular tesselated flowers engaging the language of a verdant garden.

At the same time, a sense of withholding emerges in Brady’s newest body of work. Powerful geometries introduce an impediment to deep space, and movement is checked and slowed. And in place of an open invitation to witness and join the joyful clangor of the paintings, a sense of mutual observation has emerged. In Overheard, we are blocked from entering a space of rich darks by the most seductive series of pink, olive, and lighter pink stripes; in Nothing Fixed, a set of shapes resembling earnest eyes returns our gaze with unwavering intensity. Colors in this painting, and in works like Strange City, shift dramatically in hue from rich cobalt blue to a light-absorbing rust, never swerving to extreme lightness or darkness. Through this careful calibration of color and image, with quicker moments of revelation offset by more complex moments of slowed access, we are offered a sense of reciprocal observation between viewer and painting.

In A Curtain, Not a Door, Meghan Brady’s newest paintings push aside the veil that daily life tends to shut between perceptual states, empowering us to add our own voice to the wild noise of her colors; setting the speed with which we are allowed into the compositional space; and actively watching back as we observe.

— Hilary Irons

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