Rosalyn A. Engelman is a consummate painter, or as one critic put it, ‘the painter’s painter’, whose oeuvre also features sculpture and mixed-media works. Her paintings and installation art access her personal history, memory and passionate concern for the universal human condition, expressing the full range of experience—from joyful aspiration to a powerful call to action. We welcome you to her world of vibrating colors and expressionistic brushwork. Inspired by her studies of Japanese art, one series of abstract paintings almost seems to dance in subtle calligraphic marks. Another series exhibited here renders Platonic forms in exuberant jewel-tone hues, and yet another uses monochromatic fields of black and white to imply a rich urban sensibility.

Engelman’s work has been presented internationally at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants at the Grand Palais in Paris, and the Biennale Internazionale dell’Arte Contemporanea di Firenze—where she was awarded the Lorenzo di Medici il Magnifico Gold Medal – and her work was selected by the World Court at The Hague for a frontispiece for their Volumes of Jurisprudence. A wall of eighteen of her paintings was featured at Art Basel in Miami Beach, and she has exhibited at museum and gallery shows here in New York and across the United States, among other locales and honors garnered. Rosalyn’s works are held in prestigious personal collections in the U.S, Canada, England, and Germany as well as the permanent collections of museums, corporate and non-profit organizations; she has also fulfilled significant commissions such as the Frank Lloyd Wright’s Brandes House in Washington State. She received her B.A. in Fine Arts and a M.S. from the University of Rochester, where she studied Art History. Engelman has exhibited in over 25 solo shows and over 30 group shows, and is thrilled to be joining with Kate Oh here at the gallery in a personal artistic renaissance after retrenchment from the studio during the pandemic.

“Rosalyn Engelman: The Color of Memory,” an award-winning documentary by Paul Lewis/Subterracon Films, is a conversation and studio walkabout with this remarkable artist. Filmed on location in the artist’s Manhattan studio in the early 2000s, Rosalyn, who overcame paralysis and blindness from Guillain-Barré Syndrome contracted decades prior, delivers a memorable and uplifting portrait of a life lived for art and love. The film will be shown at the opening reception.

“My work is concerned with color, process, time and emotion. It reacts to inner and external stimuli as well as memory. Painting for me is a magical experience—sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating and always a magnificent obsession. Wherever I am, awake or dreaming, I think about my work. The formal considerations of the creative process as well as how the process can reveal the paint itself. Matisse wrote in 1912 that “the problem [is] to dominate reality and by extracting substance to reveal not the thing, but the essence of the thing”. To reveal the Essence—with a capital E—is a major concern of my work. For me my work is a gateway to the unknown. It is not an easy road. It is about my Essence, the core of my being revealed. The summation of my soul, perhaps dangerously revealed, to be viewed, to reach out and meet your own…”