Becoming Light
Gisants and Trees
March 28 - April 22, 2023
at the Bowery Gallery
547 W 27 ST, suite 508 - New York, NY
Opening reception Thursday, March 30 , 5-8pm
Gallery Talk : In Conversation with Father Paul Anel, Saturday April 22, 4pm
Bowery Gallery is pleased to present this exhibition of recent drawings, paintings and pastels by artist Gael Mooney. The exhibition explores two series of works: one inspired by the interior of a Gothic cathedral in France -- the Saint-Denis Basilica -- and its medieval tomb effigies known as gisants -- and the other based upon two trees in New York's Central Park.
Mooney's work on the cathedral premises is focused on capturing the ephemeral, iridescent colors and light reflecting from stained glass as they transform the architecture and sculpture and the metaphor that this mysterious process of transformation embodies as stone which is solid is seemingly dissolved and dematerialized. Mooney sees a similar process present in nature, as represented by the series of trees in this exhibition. Her work reflects upon the paradox between solidity and dissolution, opacity and transparency, form and formlessness as light transforms appearances to lift our gaze from the earthly to the spiritual plane of existence. Rather than capturing a fleeting moment in time, her aim is to immerse herself in these changes that are occurring moment by moment to see where they may lead. Her work invites the viewer to reflect upon the tenuous division between the seen and the unseen and the meaning that this paradox embodies.
Mooney has shown her work in the United States and France. Her work at the Saint-Denis Basilica has been featured in national radio and television broadcasts in France. Writing for The New Republic in 2004, art critic Jed Perl praised Mooney's "delicately painted, prismatically colored impressions of the interior of the Basilica of Saint-Denis" citing it one of the best shows of the season.
Exhibition Catalogue: Becoming Light: Gisants and Trees (with essays by the artist and Fr. Paul Anel) , The Studley Press, 2023
General information:
Bowery Gallery, 547 W. 27th Street, Suite 508, New York, NY 10001. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11am-6pm (646) 573-8447 info@bowerygallery.org
Painting Residency in France
2022
at Basilica Saint Denis, Paris, France
I was so thrilled to be back painting at the Saint-Denis Basilica during the summer and autumn of 2022 for the first time following a hiatus of more than two years due to the pandemic. I was surprised to find the east end of the cathedral where I often paint was boarded up to install new stained glass windows to replace the original 13th century ones which were removed from the ambulatory chapels in 1997 for restoration and conservation purposes.
This permitted me to focus my work last summer instead on the gisants of the south transept with its newly installed rose window which was removed more than a decade ago while it underwent a renovation aimed at reinforcing its structure. What a joy it was to be able to re-discover the glorious colors and light of this part of the cathedral once again!
Book cover & blurb
October 2021
I'm pleased and honored to have one of my paintings from the Saint-Denis Basilica featured on the cover of this book by my friend Michele Kueter Petersen. Focusing on the writings by Paul Ricoeur and Edith Stein, Michele's book explores the meaning of contemplative silence. This book will no doubt be of interest to artists who intuitively grasp the significance of silence as a powerful means of self-expression such as that expressed visually through works of art.
This book is relevant to my work at the Saint-Denis Basilica since one of the first philosophers to write about this subject was the 5th c. monk and mystic Pseudo-Dionysius whose writings inspired Abbot Suger to build his 12th century chevet -- the earliest part of the cathedral that gave birth to the Gothic period. Suger wanted his cathedral to invoke the same process of divine illumination that Pseudo-Dionysius describes in his treatises on the metaphysics of beauty and light when, for example, he writes that we encounter God in "the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence."
