The usual litany of painting genres goes: “portraits, figurative, landscape and still life”, and brushes over the unfairly neglected subject of room interiors.
Tezh Modarressi, originally from Baltimore and now based in Philadelphia, is an artist who takes room interiors as her primary subject. She seeks out old buildings and portrays their weathered, textural surfaces bathed in shafts of light from windows, working both in layers of oil glazes on prepared paper, and more recently, in encaustic.
To my eye, she evidences a sense of admiration for the sun-streaked Dutch interiors of Pieter de Hooch, and the richly textural interior paintings of Edmund Charles Tarbell.
Modarressi’s work will be on display in a solo show at the F.A.N. Gallery here in Philadelphia from December 6, 2013 to January 25, 2014, with an opening this Friday, December 6 from 5-9pm.
The images on Modarressi’s own website are frustratingly small, those on the F.A.N. Gallery and the Chase Young Gallery give a better feeling for her work and its textural characteristics.
