Parker Gallery is proud to present Almanac, a solo exhibition by Claudia Keep, her first at the gallery. Keep’s small-scale paintings depict quotidian, yet tender moments within carefully focused compositions. Predicated on looking, each painting captures the vivid sensation of familiar perspectives. Images are drawn from the artist’s personal archive of phone snapshots, forming an ongoing diaristic documentation. Painted primarily in Vermont, Keep’s subjects include close observations of nature, tabletop still-lives, nighttime roadways, and glittering light formations. Keep intentionally returns to particular subjects repeatedly as a way of recapturing childhood memories or working through moments that continue to draw her attention. These bucolic scenes portray a portrait of an individual life with striking intimacy. Like an almanac, each painting documents the circumstances along the voyage of life, rendered with an immediacy that operates in the gap between experience and memory. By fore-fronting the emotional resonance of each moment, Keep suspends a sense of time and expands the possibilities of careful observation. The natural world takes on a folkloric quality in which peace, renewal, excitement, and mystery reign. In Dark Water, the surface of moving water glints with bright white diamond-shaped sparkles, transforming a familiar phenomenon into something fantastical. Dog, Running in the Snow depicts a loping black dog nearly silhouetted against a completely snowy white ground. By isolating her simply rendered subject, Keep evokes the common memory of encountering an ecstatic animal and opens the work to the veracity of true sensation.
Claudia Keep (b. 1993 in Low Moor, VA) lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA from Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, PA. Recent solo exhibitions include Aubade at March, New York, NY (2022); Day In, Day Out at Tif Sigfrids, Athens, GA (2022); Claudia Keep at Tops Gallery, Memphis, TN (2021); Night Moves at MARCH, New York, NY (2021); John’s Friends at Galerie Ulysses, Vienna Austria (2019); and Day in Maine at UK Medical Center Gallery, Lexington, KY (2019). Keep has also exhibited in group exhibitions Night, light at Cob Gallery, London, UK (2023); The Midnight Hour at scroll / The Hole, New York, NY (2022); When the Sun Loses Its Light at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Small Paintings at Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY (2022); The Language of Flowers at Reyes Finn, Detroit, MI (2021); The Lonely Ones at Fortnight Institute, New York, NY (2021); The Blues at The Painting Center, New York, NY (2020); Lean Out the Window at Auxier Kline, New York, NY (2020); and The Missing Half-Second at Ablebaker Contemporary, Portland, ME (2019).