KIRA NAM GREENE

Good Fortune

Acacophony of color and texture cascades all around Brooklyn artist Kira Nam Greene’s paintings. Paisley, art deco, avant-garde, Mondrian-like abstraction, check and trellis, brocade and floral, quilted squares, foliage, decorative objects—it’s a cataclysmic mash-up of style and design that seems to explode within every square inch of Greene’s creations. And yet, never lost in the beautiful madness of color are her female figures, each resiliently anchored within the vibrant world that has grown around them.

“I actually have no idea how the picture will turn out when I start it,” Greene says. “I just know to start with the figure, then I give myself problems that I can solve. But it always comes back to the figure.”

Greene’s new show, Women in Possession of Good Fortune, will highlight her new figure paintings beginning November 7 at Lyons Wier Gallery in New York City. The new works will primarily be from her series Tribal Council, which has evolved from still life works to these larger figure pieces. “The subjects are women in creative fields, posed to echo historical figurative paintings. Interviews and research into their working lives generate ways for me to render pictorially—through allusions, icons, objects, patterns and symbols—the rich pershonhood of my subjects,” Greene says. “I depict the human figure in a meticulously realist style at the center of the compositions, surrounding them with design elements from widely dispersed cultures as a testament to the deep history of transnational cultural exchanges.”

While the design elements are meant to invoke many different cultures, they are also there as a juxtaposition for everything else in the painting, even clashing elements