March 15 - April 19, 2025
From Seven Sister:
“Mara Held (b. 1954, New York) presents recent egg tempera paintings on linen in her first solo show at Seven Sisters. Twenty of the artist’s delicately painted, intricately layered abstractions will be on view, all created during the past three years. Held will be at the gallery for her opening reception on Saturday, March 15, from 2–5 PM.
The exhibition’s title, a phrase from a Rupi Kaur poem, Fingers Dipped in Honey, hints at Held’s sensorial involvement with her paintings and symbolizes a life well-lived. Her methodical use of line and reverence for order reflects similar coordination of sequences and gestural fluidity, as seen in Qigong, a Chinese practice combining meditation, breathing, and gentle movements. In the vein of spiritual abstraction, her lyrical compositions navigate polyvalent space and inner narratives while invoking connections to nature, time, energy, and geometric symbolism. But just when balance seems to be the guiding force in her work, a closer look at her paintings reveals less order than constant change: more of an admiration for symmetry than an adherence. Because of its optical complexity, Held’s work creates a web-like forcefield at peace with uncertainty, yielding to nature’s insistence on defying a fixed state.
An admiration for early Renaissance painting inspired her dedication to painting with egg tempera, a labor-intensive medium. The artist’s set-up process takes several weeks before she is ready to start painting–first applying a shellac moisture barrier to a wooden panel, which is then stretched with linen (which she’s first hand-washed), covered with two layers of rabbit skin glue, followed by eight layers of traditional ground. She makes her paints with a dispersion of raw pigment mixed with egg yolk, lavender oil, walnut oil, and some vinegar as a preservative. Her paintings vibrate with luminosity and transformation, perhaps because, as Held has acknowledged, “there is no light like the light that exists in an egg–Life itself.” Honey, too, is a bit of a marvel – coming out of a flurry of activity – an entire hive mind of bees, the chance of place and nectar to yield a sweet, sticky, and primordial fluid. Held’s work reflects a spirit that honors individual paths through the universe and the interconnectedness of all life.
Mara Held lives and works in Boiceville, NY. She moved to the highlands of Guatemala in her early 20s to study the art and ancient language of the Quiché people. She received her undergraduate degree from CUNY-City University of New York and an MA from Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles, California, before returning to New York in the 1980s. She first taught essay writing at the college level and became a full-time artist at 35. Her studio is on an old dairy farm in the picturesque Hudson Valley that has been in her family since the 1960s.
Institutions that have collected her work include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The New York Public Library; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; The International Artists’ Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel; and the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC. The New York Times, Elle Décor, and The Brooklyn Rail have profiled Held’s work. She was recently included in Blurring Boundaries: The Women of American Abstract Artists, 1936-Present (traveling exhibition 2018-2023: The Clara M. Eagle Gallery, Murray State University, Murray, KY, and the Ewing Gallery, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN.) And although this is her first show with Seven Sisters, it is her fifth solo in Houston.”
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