“The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards.”

― Helena Petrovna Blavatsky

“The dream world and the real world are the same.”

—Remedios Varo

The Pit presents “Divine Intervention,” its first exhibition of paintings by Elizabeth Huey. The exhibition will run from February 29 to April 11, 2020 with a public reception on Saturday February 29 from 5-8pm. 

Metaphorical and symbolic, Huey’s work is deeply invested in the psychology of relationships and devoted to the construction of intimate allegories employing architecture and natural elements. Akin to poetry, her paintings, like her subjects’ work, defy the particularities of space and chronology of time, exploring a disjunctive realm between the concrete and metaphysical.

Elizabeth Huey’s latest series of paintings are visual anagrams of the lives and work of four women artists — HILMA AF KLINT(1862-1944), EMMA KUNZ (1892-1963), REMEDIOS VARO (1908-1963), and LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917-2011) — symbolists and spiritualists who risked everything to push past established gender boundaries. Their visionary work is upheld as an example of women’s creativity, sexuality, sufferings, and spirituality amidst the phallogocentrism of their time. All were driven by visions and dreams, a fascination with science, and a heightened sensitivity to the fluid and malleable relationship between nature and spirit. With shared roots in Western religion, mostly Catholicism, they were driven to a path of higher consciousness and found inspiration beyond conventional thinking in the metaphysical and occult, incorporating Eastern philosophies into their life and practice.

In her dream-like and psychological paintings, Huey connects these women artists in otherworldly landscapes, replete with mountains, rivers, geometric patterning, and dramatic skies of uncertain hours. Emerging from a substratum of abstract expressive paint, the figural elements hail from a multiplicity of styles and eras. By capturing multiple events in a singular moment, the large-scale panoramic vistas embody a Proustian sense of time melted and vanished. Huey works the paintings' surface into a thickly applied impasto of oil paint imbuing it with physical and metaphorical dimensionality. Utilizing acrylic and oil to their own integrity, Huey’s work points to the limitations of rational logic, giving entry into an acausal realm of inquiry into heroic figures and disruptive and miraculous incidents.

Also included in the exhibition is a painting honoring HELENA PETROVNA BLAVATSKY (1831-1891), whose ongoing devotion to Spiritualism included the synthesis of science, religion, and philosophy. She co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, a pantheistic philosophical-religious system, and later, published the journal The Theosophist, which had a strong following. Loosely considered the Mother of the Occult in America, and an important precursor of the New Age movement, Blavatsky’s writings and teachings influenced many modern artists, including Hilma af Klint.

Two small paintings accompany the series, and serve as a hagiography of individuals aligned with the natural world. One is of Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) who was known to preach to birds and attract animals as he walked, and has been a subject for artists since the 1200s including El Greco, Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli and more; and the other is of Hildegard of Bingen (also known as Hildegarde von Bingen, 1098-1179 CE), a Christian mystic, Benedictine abbess, and polymath. 

In “Divine Intervention,” Elizabeth Huey delves into secrets still to be discovered. Her work, like the work of the women visionaries who have influenced her, opens a window of infinite possibilities.