Carrie Haddad Gallery is pleased to present If these walls could talk, a group exhibition featuring painters of interiors and architecture. Exhibiting artists include Richard Britell, Kathryn Freeman, Brigid Kennedy, Glenn Palmer-Smith, and Judith Wyer. These artists similarly explore how built environments can be emblematic of inward human experience. Also on view will be a selection of abstracted still lifes from the 1960s and early 1970s by the late Lionel Gilbert. The exhibit opens on February 14 and runs through April 6. All are welcome to attend the artists’ reception on Saturday, February 15 from 5-7 p.m.

The creative multihyphenate Richard Britell is a natural storyteller, whether through his pieces of short fiction or his artwork. This exhibition will juxtapose his oil paintings of New York City edifices – closely cropped and compacted with exquisite detail – with a recent series of portraits depicting such figures as prima ballerina Anna Pavlova and French saloniste Madame Dupin. These depictions of people and structures evidence Britell’s sophisticated sense of observation. He was born in Utica, New York; studied at Pratt Institute, Syracuse University, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and has exhibited with Carrie Haddad Gallery since the late aughts.

Drawing from classical painting techniques and her penchant for magical realism, Kathryn Freeman creates narrative works that hybridize domestic space and the natural world. For her debut exhibit with the gallery, the artist has penned short poems to accompany each of her paintings on display — together, Freeman’s words and images define a place where mankind and wildlife can coexist in peaceful harmony. This daydream is both whimsical and touching. Freeman studied at the University of New Hampshire, Skowhegan School of Painting, and Brooklyn College, and has exhibited across the United States.

Brigid Kennedy explores the interplay between inner and outer worlds. Working from photographs taken through surfaces that simultaneously reflect and reveal, such as the glass of a window, Kennedy creates luminous composites of indoor and outdoor scenes. In this paradox, elements of the suburban landscape, such as trees, sidewalks and other homes, share a picture plane with domestic interiors and their contents – furniture, lighting fixtures, bookshelves, pets and the like – making for paintings that are at once observational and utterly surreal. Kennedy earned her MFA from the Yale University School of Art and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, three NEA Visual Artists Grants, and artist residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell.

Glenn Palmer-Smith is drawn to deserted and forgotten buildings that still echo past lives. This exhibition presents selections from his series on the Palace of Versailles, for which Palmer-Smith was granted rare access to photograph some of its 1,800 rooms not open to the public. Shutters were opened for the first time in decades, flooding the dark and elegant spaces with natural, wintry light. In this expression of light and shadow, the paintings manage to transcend the grandeur of setting and forgotten treasures. Originally from the Midwest, Palmer received an MFA from the University of Utah. He went on to live in New York City and Paris, where he worked as a fashion photographer for magazines such as Vogue and Marie Claire. Palmer is known for his large-scale murals commissioned for interiors, as well as the restoration of murals at iconic New York City locations such as Café Carlyle and the Monkey Bar. He lives and works in the Hudson Valley.

In her paintings of museums and galleries, Judith Wyer invites the viewer to contemplate the act of viewing. She paints gallerygoers in moments of exchange with art objects, many of them recognizable masterworks, whose contents inform Wyer’s narrative. The artist expresses a range of psychic states through this motif. There is Sitting with Monet, wherein the emptiness of space is almost palpable; Two hats, with a humorous parallel between the subject of a portrait and its viewer; and White dress, a meditation on the social significance of women’s dress throughout the ages. Wyer earned an MFA from Brooklyn College and has been exhibited widely in the northeast, including a recent survey of women artists at Lehman College titled Framing the female gaze: women artists and the new historicism.

To round out the exhibition, the gallery will exhibit a selection of still-life paintings from the late Lionel Gilbert. Born in 1912 in Newark, New Jersey, Gilbert was the definition of a working artist; at different points in his career, he was a muralist, illustrator, art teacher, and full-time painter. His still lifes range in degree of figuration, with recognizable objects like fruit, vases and flowers sharing space with gestural swaths of paint. Beyond his practice, Gilbert is fondly remembered as a teacher at the 92nd Street Y Art Center, where he worked from 1967 to his passing in 2002.