Giordanne Salley
Now or Later, 2020
oil on canvas over panel
4 x 6 inches
Price: $1,000 / Offered here at: $800

We found Giordanne Salley’s work via an artist. Kyle Staver mentioned her on a FB post and we were immediately struck by how her early work seemed to build from Milton Avery. She was in a group show at SHFAP in 2014, where Roberta Smith drew attention to her. Salley’s paintings seem genuinely romantic. They often depict lovers in the woods, capturing the complex, playful moments between two people. The artist creates a patterned space built on intuition and imagination. She describes her work as a daydream, the places and memories she thinks about while living and working in New York City. Objects closest to our bodies–glasses, watches, bras, sandals–are often casualties of the fun, carefree moments depicted. These items, lost or discarded during playful moments, become intertwined with the nature around them. In “Now or Later,” a watch sinks, accompanying the shells and pebbles at the bottom of a lake, as the shallow water ripples over them. Martha Swendener wrote about this motif in Salley’s work in the New York Times, stating, “there is no human time in nature, just as paintings, when completed, enter the vacuum of art-historical time.” There are hints of other images as well which lend this painting its abstract quality. At 4″ x 6″ this is one of the artist’s smallest works.