HESSE FLATOW is pleased to announce the opening of Limbs, an exhibition of works on paper by the Bay Area artist Devra Fox, marking her second solo presentation with the gallery.
Rendered with hyper-realistic precision, Devra Fox’s graphite drawings of anthropomorphized plant forms muse on notions of containment outside of the body. In seamlessly grafting anatomical features like spinal vertebrae or arterial chambers with vegetal offshoots, she extends the metaphor of the vessel beyond the somatic. Thoughts, memories, and emotions are embodied and compartmentalized into spliced forms, creating equivalencies between cellular renewal and psychological repair.
This interconnection between inner and outer worlds, and more broadly, amidst cyclical stages from birth until death, govern the symmetries and counterbalances within Fox’s works. In Holding Place, stones resembling the shape of lungs appear nestled in and out of a plant rib cage, intertwining the inanimate with the living. In Linked Prospect, two downward facing lilies hang cantilevered over a cavernous black void. Like balancing scales, their weights shift with the cathartic release of water droplets measuring progress or the passage of time.
Sticking to monochromatic compositions, Fox’s gradients of a singular hue explore fluctuations across a spectrum of an isolated idea or emotion. Graphite’s range on a gray scale from light to dark encapsulate the opacities of closed containers on one end, the unknowable depths of cavities on the other, and the porous seepages in between.
Always operating on dualities, Limbs, derived from the Latin limbus meaning “edge” perfectly encapsulates the fine line that Fox straddles between the floral and corporeal, the mind and body, and interior and exterior.
Devra Fox (b. 1989) is an artist, sculptor and printmaker originally from Seattle, WA currently residing in San Francisco, CA. Fox received her BA in Studio Art from Bard College in 2012 and her MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University in 2016. Her work often features natural forms and surrealistic fauna delicately rendered in graphite on paper. The artist has participated in notable domestic residencies at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA, as well as at The Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT and The Woman’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY. Internationally she has had residencies at Pocoapoco in Oaxaca, Mexico and was a visiting artist at Cow House Studios in Wexford, Ireland. She is the recipient of the Morty Frank Travel Fellowship (Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Columbia University) and the Christina R. Tarsell Award for Studio Arts (Bard College).
