Randy WrayHothouse

New abstract paintings by Randy Wray, made over two years in a studio he calls “a kind of hothouse where I’m growing paintings”: earthy, green-toned forms with a sharp, lustrous finish.

Wray works on a painting over long stretches, leaving it and coming back, and carries forms from one canvas into the next: a cluster of fine lines in Flower turns up again, changed, in Organ, and began in a 2019–21 painting, Root. He calls these recurring elements “transmissions.” His surfaces are thick and built up, burnished in places and scarred in others.

Some of the new paintings set hard geometry, a band along the bottom edge or a right angle like a windowsill, against his usual soft, organic shapes; in others one large monochrome form, raised like a wax seal or a shell, fills the front of the picture. They hover between abstraction and things half-recognized: bones, organs, flowers, landscapes seen from above.

Full details at karmakarma.org