Gurari Collections is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by the artist Wendy Artin. Entitled Roma Antica, the exhibition will be held from November 1 through December 15, 2002 in our gallery located at 91 Charles Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Roma Antica, Artin's upcoming show of watercolors at Gurari Collections, features 60 sepia landscapes of ancient Rome, and a selection of sanguine nudes.

Roma Antica is a painter's discovery and exploration of the city that has become her home since she arrived there eight years ago. Her subjects are the heart of ancient Rome: Trajan’s Market, the Circus Maximus, the Roman Forum, the Theatre of Marcellus. Her watercolors are precise, loose, intense. "Watercolor is a living medium, whose beauty lies in its incredible range, from the pigments flowing across a wet page to a scant brushstroke bumping along a slightly rough surface, from the broadest of shadows to the tiniest of details."

"To paint classically is, for me, to pay tribute to light, to form, and to the beauty of the landscape, architecture, and sculpture," says Artin. "It is to pay tribute to the art of painting itself. Rome is a place where you can paint outdoors nearly all year round. It is a slow city, a city suffused with tradition, history, and romance. It is a place to dream, to linger over life rather than to rush through it."

Artin's almost supernatural deftness with light and shadow, the human form and the suggestive space around it, has never seemed so assured or evocative as it does with these new watercolors of her favorite models. Painting in her Roman studio, Artin brings the same technique and experience of looking closely at her city to the way she looks at, and represents, the human body.

Described by Vanity Fair as a painter in possession of "a gift so rare it humbles artists with far more stellar reputations," Artin has been likened to an "exceptional athlete" by the painter Eric Fischl. "I have never seen such grace, such sureness, so much sexy pleasure from the hand of a living artist," he says. "It is hard for the lay person to comprehend the difficulty she has mastered in her life drawings. To watch her work is to watch a master."