Harbinger

Vanessa Powers is a surreal figurative oil painter whose work uses a visceral symbolic language to navigate her inner world and how it relates to our current cultural climate in terms of how we process loss and uncertainty. Her paintings explore themes including grief, mortality, and resiliency. The figures in her paintings are translucent, isolated, or skeletal parts of bodies set in landscapes that often reference the climate crisis The art history references in her work including Goya’s “Black Paintings” comment on contemporary societal conditions and the cyclical nature of power, wealth distribution, and civil unrest. The transparent organisms in her work symbolize transcendence, essence, and disappearance. Many of the translucent beings in her work can be found in nature such as the glass mantis and are an example of the oscillation she presents between her subconscious, our collective psyche, and the natural world. Powers has exhibited her work at venues including Jonathan Levine Projects at Ki Smith Gallery, New York City; The Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, New York; Modern Eden Gallery, San Francisco; La Luz de Jesus Gallery, Los Angeles; Field Projects, New York City; Baton Rouge Gallery, Louisiana; WAR Gallery, London; and SVA Chelsea Gallery, New York City amongst others. Her work has been featured in publications such as the The New York Times, Hyperallergic, and Visual Arts Press. Powers received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts and is currently based in and from New York.