FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Celia Reisman: Street Views

Artist Conversation: Saturday, October 3, 2 PM

On View: September 18 - October 17, 2026

Gross McCleaf Gallery, 123 Leverington Ave, Philadelphia, PA, 19127

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.”

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.

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 throughout 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.

View Celia Reisman: Street Views Here

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Common Ground, curated by Celia Reisman

Featuring Claudia Rilling, Lou Schellenberg, Laura Vahlberg, and Sophie C. White

An Exhibition Essay, written by Elizabeth Johnson and edited by Matthew Crain, is available below.

Along with Street Views, Celia Reisman's solo show, Common Ground features four painters, chosen by Reisman, that address the subject of architecture in landscape. Both exhibits investigate the formal, realistic, abstract and imaginative possibilities of real-world locations.

Common Ground invites viewers to compare painterly decisions made by Claudia Rilling, Lou Schellenberg, Laura Vahlberg, and Sophie C. White within the context of Street View's aesthetic. Seen together, Reisman and the artists of Common Ground emphasize composition, palette, spatial constructions, and the practical and emotional issues concerning where and how we live now. The five artists ask: How do we look at a location and reinterpret it? What decisions do we make to capture and reference a specific place? Does our domestic environment infer a statement about how we use land? Aesthetic differences and similarities present a unique opportunity for viewers to contemplate the influence, the "where"––the specific places the artists have lived, worked and visited ––on the "how" they work.

Reisman admires Claudia Rilling's "deliberate way of organizing shapes and color." Attracted to rendering architecture and other man-made forms, Rilling prefers working from imperfect preparatory drawings and studies rather than from literal architectural copies. Emphasizing shape and color notes, her painting process both breaks and highlights clear edges. Editing extraneous information lets what was originally most exciting about a place come forward. Allowing herself to disregard accurate perspective, Rilling sights a few important angles that let the architecture feel right within the picture frame. Loose paint handling, broken edges and lines make structural geometry feel alive. La Sera's shaped stillness and emergent clarity create calm, while energetic brushwork integrates vigorous composition with mysterious personal ease and freedom.

Lou Schellenberg is gesturally expressive with abstract brushwork and mark-making. Feeling that we never can quite grasp how transient we are, Schellenberg works directly from her source, spontaneously depicting land, buildings, and familiar places in Nova Scotia and Pennsylvania. Some locations trigger associations about containment, privacy, and how environments were shaped over time: Why is this house or natural shape of here? Why is it so close to others? What bit of ground or nature was left alone? How long before it’s gone? She ponders how the land and human routines of survival influence the view she sees. Stages on the Edge observes a fishing platform as it gradually slides year by year into a harbor, presenting a dark and exaggeratedly precarious metaphor for contemporary life.

Laura Vahlberg's work is "minimal and reductive," to quote Reisman. Vahlberg describes her work as painting "simple shapes she sees in the world," a response to the visual overload of everyday life. She summarizes individual parts of a scene and organizes them into an accessible, impactful design. A quiet haze permeating the work dissolves forms that are clearly placed within a spatial format: slow-emerging intimacy comes from removing details. Hotel feels like a painting of overlapping auras, the brightly lit building in the background merges with a darker car in the foreground. The car becomes an observer, seeming to share what it sees with the viewer. The abstract design of the hotel and car create a pleasing interval of repetition and dissonance, inhabiting a sun-drenched world while signaling a vital, grounded, basic narrative.

Working near her city neighborhood, Sophie C. White's colorful, cheerful imagery carries powerful critiques of urban development. Neighborhood activism, sadness and anger over runaway condo construction and lost green space inspire her spirited plein air paintings. White mixes her palette on-site atop a bike with a milk crate for supplies, gripping her block of watercolor paper. Recording details, she abstracts form in response to the scene, evoking piled-up congestion through the collision of architecture and nature. Parting suggests mourning and gratitude for a chance to say goodbye to a beloved hibiscus; its imagery frames a backhoe with lush foliage, powerlines, sunflowers and a wooden fence, as if creating space equals hope. Paying close attention to the balance of preservation, destruction and construction via composition fuels White's visual commentary in the war between financial opportunism and the shared urban spaces she calls home.

Celia Reisman and the artists of Common Ground construct their paintings thoughtfully. Each in her own way honors the tradition of observing and interpreting the subject of human structures in landscape. All humans impose changes on their environment: these five artists not only make paintings of realistic places but works that leverage vastly different relationships to ideas about place. Investigating how we inhabit factual and imagined locales, the artists engage with, alter, remember, reframe and reorganize both their chosen subjects and their orientation to them. Taken as a whole, both exhibits create an opportunity to absorb permissive conceptions of place, nudging everyone to experience the momentary flash, breadth, and depth of how being located exactly here feels so different for other people.

View Common Ground Here