Ceres Gallery will be closed as of Tuesday, March 17
due to the Coronavirus pandemic. We hope our friends, family and patrons stay safe and healthy and visit us again when things return to normal.

Ceres Juried Exhibition "Signs of the Times" will be shown on line during its scheduled time and shown physically at a later date when Ceres Gallery can reopen.

March 3 - 28, 2020   
Gallery I

Ecstatic Views of Nature: Painting and Sculpture
Phyllis Rosser

Reception:
Friday, March 13, 6-8pm

Passion Flower, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

Ceres Gallery presents Phyllis Rosser's Ecstatic Views of Nature, a retrospective of her paintings and sculpture.

Rosser's paintings of gardens are utopian versions of the constructed landscape found in various places in the world. Flowers and plants are depicted as living sculptures. Her paintings seduce us into examining their natural forms and colors close up. Their brilliant and dynamic use of color and precise lines invite the viewer to walk inside the blossoms. Art Historian/Critic Anne Swartz says “We’re looking at nature in its glory, at its most copious....the flowers are truly romantic in that they are both beautiful (vital forms) and sublime (prompting a sense of awe at the spectacle of nature).”

The wildness of nature is celebrated in her sculpture: tree limbs and branches stripped bare of their bark and bleached in the sun. She gathers them from the banks of the Connecticut River in Vermont and transforms them into abstract constructions. The power and resilience of the wood as it collects on the banks of the river is echoed in the way the branches are woven into her wall-hung sculptures. Their surfaces are left bare to recall their earlier life rushing through water which heightens the sensuality of the bare wood. Rosser titles her work with phrases from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass to express their shared exuberance for the natural world.

Ecstatic Views of Nature will include 18 paintings and 15 sculptures. This is Phyllis Rosser’s 20th solo show. She is represented in numerous private and public collections including the Microsoft Art Collection, the Smith College Museum of Art, the Sylvia Sleigh collection at Rowan University and Janssen Associates. She has appeared in many group shows in New York, New Jersey and throughout New England.

March 3 - 28, 2020   
Gallery II

Fragments of Beauty: Paintings 
Marsha Heller 

Receptions:
Thursday, March 12, 6-8pm
Saturday, March 14, 3-5pm

In Marsha Heller’s solo exhibition, Fragments of Beauty, the viewer experiences her landscapes, skyscapes, intimate details of nature or its broad vistas, as acts of passion rendered through an artist’s discipline. The fragments of beauty which she encounters everywhere imbue the images with power and delicacy in equal measure. Heller’s color palette, with its extraordinary range from bold to soft and shimmering, is less concerned with empirical fact than with experienced truth. And yet, the facts of nature are there: in the brilliance of light, the burst of wetland grasses, the roil of wind, all rendered through strokes of color and suffused with energy.

Heller’s New York exhibitions include the Cork Gallery in Lincoln Center, Phoenix Gallery, and St. Peter’s Church in the Citicorp Building. In her home state of New Jersey, Montclair State University Gallery One featured Heller in a solo exhibition. She has been the recipient of various juried prizes, and Artspeak Magazine has described her work as “colors (creating) a shimmering surface….Warm and cool, light and dark, they dance around the canvas until flowers, bushes or trees emerge from a tapestry of marks. The seductive mosaic of color is satisfying in itself.”

Heller’s work was chosen to represent New Jersey in the permanent collection of PNC Bank in Pittsburgh, and is also included in numerous private collections. Her encaustic painting, “Emerging Spring,” was selected for inclusion in Marcie Cooperman’s seminal textbook, “Color: How to Use It,” published in 2013 by the educational publisher Pearson in coordination with Parsons/The New School of Design. In addition to Ceres Gallery, Heller is represented by The Riverside Gallery in Hackensack, New Jersey, Yaacov Heller Gallery in Boca Raton, Florida, Portage Hill Gallery in Mayville, NY, Chester Gallery in Chester, Connecticut and Harvest Gallery in Dennis, Massachusetts.