Terry Rose: Portals

February 29 — March 22 at Gallery NAGA

Painter Terry Rose, whose flowing abstractions have recently attracted considerable attention, presents his largest exhibition to date in a major show at Gallery NAGA.

Terry Rose: Portals runs from February 29 through March 22.  A reception for the artist and the public will be held at the gallery on Friday, February 29 from 6 to 8 pm.

Rose’s first Boston show, in 2006, led to the inclusion of his work in the 2007 exhibition Big Bang: Abstract Painting for the 21st Century at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.  In the new work he has developed since, to be shown at NAGA, the forms in his work, which were suggestive of both marine life and microbiology, among many other associations, have evolved and now suggest specific entities less than they do layers or formations of gases or liquids.  “These images are more interior,” Rose says, “and almost distant, like a landscape.”

Rose’s process hasn’t changed, but his paintings are now reflecting more directly the manner of their making.  Flat on their backs, his aluminum panels are first toned with thick wet layers of varnish into which Rose introduces oils and dry pigments, which disperse within the varnish.  To an extent, the paintings compose themselves through a hydraulic process that Rose initiates, which he can, at this point, anticipate, but which he does not fully control.  He refers to this as “the natural processes of the materials.”

In the new work, he says, “the varnish is becoming more of the image itself, sometimes cloudlike and atmospheric, sometimes like the pouring of liquids, in floods and pools.”  To the few who have seen the new paintings, they conjure vast spaces, in which light fractures between translucent strata.

When asked if the concerns of the new work are fundamentally different, Rose replies, “I’m concerned with growing and evolving, and I’m thinking about going deeper.”