Description
‘Gallows Humor’ by Vanessa Powers
Artist: Vanessa Powers
Title: ‘Gallows Humor’
Medium: Oil on linen
Dimensions: 12″ x 9″ x 1.5″
Framing: Unframed
Year of Creation: 2023
About the Artwork:
“GALLOWS HUMOR is a portrait of an old, very close friend of mine. With dark humor and strength of character, I have watched her grow through adversity as she continues to be a determined, caring, and loyal confidant.
This painting is the first in a new series where I continue to explore the themes of vice, grief, mortality, and resiliency. In this series, I move away from self portraiture and skew these themes through the prism of my relationship with the subject and their own life experiences.” – Vanessa Powers
About the Artist:
(Artist Bio)
Vanessa Powers is a figurative oil painter whose work uses a visceral symbolic language to navigate her inner world and how it relates to our current cultural climate. Her surreal bordering on grotesque paintings explore themes including grief, vice, mortality, and resiliency. Powers uses her paintings to articulate a personal spirituality with an emphasis on the significance of ritual, memory, and the profoundly human impulse of ceremony.
Vanessa received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She exhibits her work both nationally and internationally with her most recent exhibitions at Modern Eden Gallery in San Francisco, La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, Arch Enemy Arts in Philadelphia, and the juried exhibition Surreal Salon 14 at Baton Rouge Gallery in Louisiana.
Previous projects include her art displayed in a vacant storefront walking tour in Manhattan during the height of the pandemic in 2020, her painting “Choice or Fate” printed as a billboard in Brooklyn with the non profit SaveArtSpace in 2019, and the inclusion of her mural in “Anthropocene” a curated mural cycle at First Street Green Art Park in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 2018. Vanessa is currently based in and from New York.