Ireland Wisdom’s first solo show in Athens at The Breeder

The Breeder presents Ireland Wisdom’s first solo show in Athens following her two months’ residency at The Breeder Open Studio, an initiative that offers time to the artist and the viewer to interact with each other and to engage in substantial ways. During this time Wisdom completed a body of work emphatically imbued with her experience as an artist living and working in Athens, greatly influenced by Greek mythology and brought to life through a lens of contemporaneity.

The show revolves around the raw emotions and functions of human beings, who are depicted as semi gods or mythological creatures, unapologetically sensual and brutally real. The main piece of the exhibition, “Panselinos”, depicts Pan, the god of the wild who would be worshipped in natural settings and had the legs and the horns of a goat, in the company of a nymph who is comfortably laying nude in front of him, holding a knife between her legs, surrounded by fish as a reference to the Mediterranean diet as well as the natural act of eating. Through her compositions Wisdom creates a new mythology of primal action and rawness of instinct fully embedded in a seemingly comfortable naturalistic setting.

Wisdom pays homage to the 18th century European painting of still life subjects surrounding the larger pieces, while a series of charcoal drawings add to the whimsical ambience of the exhibition. The drawings, simpler and delicate, with a minimum amount of details, feel lighthearted while saying a story on their own.

The exhibition concludes with Wisdom’s self-portraits, which add to the tradition of the grand masters and for the artist serve as witness to her own process of transformation throughout the last months. Her traveling to Greece, embarking on the experience of The Breeder Open Studio and encountering the Athenian landscape and its people has added up to a quite transformative and enriching year.

Born in 1996, in LA, California, Ireland Wisdom lives and works in LA. She has had solo exhibitions in Kontemporary Residency, Seoul, Korea, Bowlish House; Somerset, UK; Carlye Packer, LA; and has participated in group exhibitions in Miami, USA; Seoul, Korea; Los Angeles, USA; Florence, Italy; and Santa Monica, USA. Her work has been featured in Artnews, LAWeekly and Cultured Magazine among others.

Wisdom received classical training in figure painting at the Florence Academy of Art, which included three years of live models daily painting. Many of her subjects she met during her residency at Zorthian Ranch – the 70+ year old infamous 48-acre Altadena mountain functioning ranch, where hundreds of notable people including Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Charlie Parker, Segovia, Richard Feynman, and many more gathered to exchange ideas and celebrate bacchanalian times with its Armenian late-proprietor, artist Jirayr Zorthian.

Her influences range from Boticelli, Albrecht Dürer and Velazquez to Dorothea Tanning. Some of her works are composed almost like tarot cards, with the flatness of a Byzantine Church mosaic while her subjects touch upon contemporary iconography. Her subjects are stripped away from time and place, reminiscent in many ways of old style painting but always attached to the contemporary with a distinct focus to detail. For Wisdom, painting is about imbuing old values, ancient iconography and style, with newness, creating a landscape in which all time periods can be found and new value systems can be formed.