Allston Skirt Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new work by Sharon Kaitz. In her first solo exhibition at the gallery, Kaitz shows luminous paintings that draw inspiration from the poetry of early 20th century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova; glowing canvases in tones of copper and silver, green and pink, with deeply graphic black marks and symbols staking claims across their surfaces. Connected to her earlier works that use letters, words and lines to map out a familiar yet idiosyncratic language, Kaitz goes further in developing a personal vocabulary emerging directly out of life experiences: sadness, love, and always, hope.

Art historian Eric Rosenberg, in his essay about Kaitzâs new body of work, states: "What is so exciting about Sharon Kaitz's new work is that in letting go of the literalness of words, these paintings suggest the possibility that words and letters were, or are, forms in the world, in our cognitive fields, before and beside their status as meaning, or units thereof. What, in other words, might cognition look like if it were always formal, as well as contentive? Ho do we recognize language as extant while feeling its forms as resistant to meaning? What might it be like to have language that is natural to us, innate, and yet prior to understanding, or exclusive of it? What, in other words, would language be like if we could see it,
recognize it visually as our own, but have that recognition stop short of semantics, syntax, narrative, description?"

Accompanying the paintings is a brand new floorpiece, reflecting themes from the paintings, but with its own voice. Evoking a serene tea ceremony or a modernist dinner party, the simple vocabulary of form and color takes on a third dimension that is reminiscent of Kaitzâs previous sculptural work, which includes paintings on suitcases, teacups on canvases, and drawings on table linens and hats. Kaitz purposely stirs the two dimensional with the three dimensional, the everyday with th