Ireland Wisdom
The Breeder Open Studio
January 13, 2024–March 2, 2024The Breeder Feeder, Athens
Breeder is pleased to welcome Ireland Wisdom, an emerging American artist of quite a distinctive style and aura to The Breeder Open Studio for a period of two months, starting in January 2024.
The initiative of The Breeder Open Studio offers time to the artist and the viewer to interact with each other and to engage in substantial ways over a period of time. Within this scope, Wisdom will occupy the second floor of the gallery and transform it into her studio where she intends to continue the tradition of live models painting, focusing mostly on nudes.
Open Studio visiting hours: every Saturday, 3-5 pm when visitors will be able to meet the artist and witness the creative process. A presentation of her work and outcome of the Open Studio will follow in March 2024.
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. All of her subjects are set in a Goya-esque blackness and 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.
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 Parker, LA and has participated in group exhibitions in Miami, USA, Seoul, Korea, LA, USA, Florence, Italy, Santa Monica, USA. She was also featured in Artnews, LAWeekly and Cultured Magazine among others.
