Open event: Sat 8th Feb, 3pm – 5pm
Exhibition open 8th Feb – 5th April 2025, Mon-Fri 10am – 4pm
The Art Station is delighted to present SCENES FROM A PLACE CALLED WORLD: 2020 – 2025.
A solo exhibition of paintings by Rebecca Riess filling our lobby space in Saxmundham.
Image: ‘Hades‘, 2021, 50 x 50cm, Vinyl Emulsion on Linen
Image courtesy of the artist.
Part truth, part fiction, Scenes From A Place Called World brings together a collection of work which morph’s between contemporary realism and surrealism. Riess is interested in the psychological effects of circumstance. Her paintings contain fictional spaces which overlap with reality, transient timelines, feminist and socio-political concerns and critiques. Through these obscured narratives Riess processes subjects including Long Covid, The Abuse of Power, War, and Climate Breakdown. She is interested in how we digest and internalise experience’s and information, fusing her own psychology and imagination that create ‘example’ worlds.
Rebecca Riess was born in London in 1972. She received her BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore MD, USA 1994 and MFA from Columbia University, School of The Arts, NYC, USA 1996. Riess moved to Suffolk in 2010 from London and lives and works in Sudbury. Her practice involves drawing, painting, sculpture and stitching. The work usually contains fictional spaces which overlap with reality, non-linear timelines, feminist and socio-political concerns and critiques. She has exhibited in the US (including LA, Chicago, NYC) in Europe, and more recently had solo shows at 303 Projects, 2023 and The Art Station in 2024. She is 1/2 of For Folk Sake a new curatorial and artist collective working throughout East Anglia, UK.
Image: ‘Dead Rural’, 2022, 50 x 70cm Vinyl Emulsion on Linen
Image courtesy of the artist
About this collection, Riess said, “There is a direct relationship to the world and my existence in it: emotional, physical, political. My painting is never fully abstracted because it contains so much of the subjective. All my work contains such distinct narratives, which are not always narratives I care to share. The narrative is really part of a process to enable me to complete a piece. I cannot finish the work without a personal understanding of what it means to me on a very fundamental level. Shapes have relationships to each other, that transcend the purely visual, just like a relationship of an idea in the past relates to an idea in the present or future. Timelines, ideas, forms, colours, all overlap in the fiction of making, but narrative is at the root of the whole process.
Image: ‘Low Resolution’, 2025, 50 x 70cm Vinyl Emulsion & Acrylic on Linen
Image courtesy of the artist