Lifecycle brings together paintings and small works on paper, demonstrating Wren’s ability to create complex representations of depth through variations in well-chosen line and color. Using precise and methodical brushwork, she builds ethereal, abstracted fields of color tethered to meticulously gridded surfaces. Her work contains a number of tensions: illusionistic depictions of space at once flattened by crisp line, gently undulating gradients parceled out in regimented structure, and form that gives way to blurred haze.These tensions derive from her interest in transitional moments in the natural world, when atmospheric states seem about to give way to change. She describes this work as “an interplay that suggests the universal duality between structure and randomness, order and chaos, the known and the unknown.”

Rachael Wren received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MFA from the University of Washington. She has had solo shows at Wave Hill, The Painting Center, Schema Projects, the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and Providence College. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the National Academy Museum, Garis & Hahn, Jeff Bailey Gallery, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Trestle Gallery, and the Fosdick-Nelson Gallery at Alfred University, among many others. Rachael is the recipient of the Julius Hallgarten Prize from the National Academy Museum and an Aljira Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies at Chashama North, the Saltonstall Foundation, the Byrdcliffe Art Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Anderson Center, and the Artist House at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Wren’s exhibition and on-campus visit is generously sponsored in part by the Wells College Scholar In Residence program.