Carrie Haddad Gallery is pleased to present Understories, a group exhibition of painting and mixed-media works by Anne Francey, Allyson Levy, Eileen Murphy, Rinal Parikh, Ragellah Rourke and Annika Tucksmith. In the upstairs gallery, there will be a solo show of new paintings by David Konigsberg. The exhibit opens on August 16 and will remain on view through October 6. All are welcome to attend the artist reception on August 17 from 5-7 p.m.

Toile de juoy, a bucolic design style originating in 18th-century France, serves as the backdrop of Anne Francey’s most recent paintings. Her interpretations of birds, plants and bugs sprawl across the patterned linen as a series of intuitive marks; these colorful gestures are set in direct opposition to the manufactured, monochromatic representation of nature inherent to the Toile de juoy tradition. Francey received a Fulbright Scholar grant as well as numerous grants from the New York State Council of the Arts to support her community mural projects.

Allyson Levy organizes the visual splendor of the natural world in her encaustic works, borrowing form from seeds, leaves, flora, and other organic matter to create patterned abstractions that teem with vitality. The artist’s admiration for plant life runs deep; with her husband, she operates Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, a level II arboretum in Stone Ridge that specializes in rare genera. This enterprise has only strengthened Levy’s sensitivity to the life cycles of plants, a sensibility she channels in her encaustics.

The recent landscapes of Eileen Murphy are formally accomplished while utterly enchanting. In many of these peopleless paintings, sightlines are obscured as if a translucent sheet is draped somewhere between subject and viewer; elsewhere, reality submits to Murphy’s painterly liberties as streams of water flow in gravity-defying directions, treetops shimmer with starlight, and root systems dissolve into fibrous whirls. A recipient of the Santo Foundation’s Individual Artist Award and participant in the Art in the Embassies program, Murphy holds an MFA from the Pratt Institute and has taught at New England College, Mount Holyoke College, and Sarah Lawrence College.

In her first show with the gallery, Rinal Parikh will exhibit intricate mixed-media works based in Indian folk art, specifically the Madhubani, Kalamkari and Warli traditions. A biochemist by education and an artist by profession, Parikh uses an ultra-fine brush to realize monochromatic landscapes that are populated by flora, fauna, fish and human figures. Her work has been frequently exhibited in the Northeast and is held by collectors in the United States and abroad.

An effervescent palette of light blues, pinks and golds anchors the latest paintings of Ragellah Rourke, a native of the Hudson Valley who has spent the past three decades honing her style of abstraction. Within geometric zones, Rourke applies layer upon layer of paint – both oil and acrylic – building a picture plane that is elaborate while ethereal, much like her muse: the countryside of upstate New York. The artist attended the University at Albany, where she graduated with a degree in Fine Arts.

Set in the Hudson Valley – or in liminal spaces reminiscent of the region – Annika Tucksmith’s paintings are stages for ambiguous rituals carried out by adolescents who walk a tightrope between naïveté and revelation. Tucksmith grew up in Columbia County and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University.

Hung in the upstairs gallery, David Konigsberg’s landscapes feature billowing clouds above countrysides rendered in brown, grey and gold. Softly focused while highly evocative, these canvases extend Konigsberg’s endeavor to “portray transitional spaces, metaphoric moments and alternative histories.” He earned a MacDowell Fellowship in 1998 and has exhibited widely in New York.