Sydney Licht
“Traditionally, still life paintings have portrayed items from the realm of the domestic....food, utensils, dishes, flowers and other elements that celebrate the table. These days, however, food often arrives packaged up, sealed and sanitized. Table tops, furniture and interior spaces become resting places for boxes and other detritus waiting to be sorted or discarded.
Color in its quantity and specificity can affect how we perceive things as either developed illusions or simple shapes. Through a continued focus on shape, pattern and color, I hope to translate what I see around me into works that articulate this dynamic reality of our visual culture.”
Sydney Licht's application of color distills quotidian objects into their most basic forms. Books, notecards, purses, and matchboxes become loosely defined silhouettes. Her abstract language subverts the intimate experience of everyday objects, paring visual information down to shapes and textures through the intentional application of boldly colored pigment. Licht’s oil paintings on canvas or panel straddle the line between representation and abstraction, challenging the boundaries of what a still life can be.
Sydney Licht has exhibited across the United States, including a 2022 solo exhibition at the Zillman Art Museum in Bangor, Maine. Group exhibitions include those at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Memorial Art Gallery Museum of the University of Rochester and as well as at numerous commercial galleries nationwide. She was a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Grant, a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, a Yaddo Residency Fellowship, and has been a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome on three occasions, most recently in November 2023. Her work has been reviewed in The Chicago Tribune , The Chicago Sun-Times and by Jerry Saltz for New York Magazine. Sydney Licht lives and works in New York City and is represented by kathryn Markel Fine Arts with two locations in New York City.