Celia Reisman
Celia Reisman: Street Views
On View: September 18 - October 17, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 19, 1-4 PM
Location: Gross McCleaf Gallery, The Mill Studios, 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia, PA
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, these paintings transform familiar neighborhoods into imagined places where observation and invention coexist.
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.”
Stay tuned for the exhibition preview, and additonal information.
"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
Strafford Hedges, Oil on canvas, 9" x 12"
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.
