Celia Reisman
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Celia Reisman: Street Views
On View: September 18 - October 17, 2026
Location: Gross McCleaf Gallery, The Mill Studios, 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia, PA
Artist Conversation: Saturday, October 3
Visitor parking is located in The Mill Studios lot, accessible from Leverington Avenue.
Gross McCleaf Gallery is proud to present Street Views, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Celia Reisman. Based on gouache drawings made on location throughout the Philadelphia suburbs, rural Vermont, and Portland, Oregon, Reisman’s paintings transform familiar neighborhoods, keeping elements of the original view while freely rearranging and reimagining them.
Through clear-edged forms, heightened color combinations, shifting perspectives, and alterations in scale, Reisman reimagines ordinary streets, backyards, gardens, and architecture as carefully constructed worlds. Drawn from lived experience yet reshaped through memory and intuition, each painting balances abstraction and representation. The traces of everyday life become the foundation for compositions that, in Reisman’s words, “all add up to a place that calls out to be seen, embraced, recorded, documented.”
"The reality I see is transformed into a fictional place with each painting becoming a caricature...What is it that attracted me to that location? What is special about it? It is not grand, or unusual in any way but the light that day, the color surrounding the architecture or the architecture itself along with the display of personal objects all add up to a place that calls out to be seen, embraced, recorded, documented." - Celia Reisman
Tall Trees, Oil on canvas, 26" x 28"
For Reisman, a painting often begins with something unexpected that makes her stop and look. A pink house, an intensely colored tree, an umbrella, or a dramatic shadow across a building can become the starting point for a composition.
“There has to be some quirky something that catches my eye,” Reisman explains. “I see some place, stop to look, then decide if I can compose a picture.” Rather than emphasizing the expansive sense of distance often associated with landscape painting, Reisman often compresses space, stacking shapes and forms within the picture plane. “My work has shallow space made from shapes piled on top of each other,” she says. “I’m more interested in confrontation and congestion within the rectangle.”
That process of looking, selecting, and recomposing allows even the most recognizable elements of a neighborhood to become newly unfamiliar, while enough of the original place remains to anchor the image. In Street Views, Reisman invites us to look again at the places we might otherwise pass by, drawing attention to the unexpected meetings between colors, shapes, and architecture within the everyday suburban landscape.
Portland Overlap, Oil on canvas, 18" x 22"
About the Artist
Celia Reisman lives and works in Merion, Pennsylvania and Strafford, Vermont.
She received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Yale University. She is represented in Philadelphia by Gross McCleaf Gallery, Paul Thiebaud Gallery in San Francisco and Morpeth Contemporary in Hopewell, NJ.
She has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions and group shows through out the United States. The American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition awarded her a Purchase Prize and she was given a Survey Exhibition at the Michener Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
She has been a Visiting Critic at programs in the U.S., Italy, and Ireland and taught at numerous Art Departments in the Northeast.
