De Luca Fine Art Gallery is proud to present paintings by American artist, writer and fashion icon Gloria Vanderbilt.

"If Gloria Vanderbilt were a dilettante, seeing her work would be like looking into a kaleidoscope, with the loose bits of colored glass arranging themselves in predictably changing, pretty, and boring combinations. But in her hands, old and expected patterns can be wrenched, and any prettiness will have a sense of torque to it and even, maybe, a frisson of something violent.

Over time Vanderbilt’s work has gone in many different directions, has sustained, and continues to surprise. She works in different media (oil, acrylic, egg tempera), and her palette has always been bright with varieties of pink, red, lavender, yellow. It is vibrant, with intelligence as present in vivid, but has only been in the service of an idea, a composition, a feeling, an emotion, and is never after just prettiness.

In her work there is nothing of sentimentality, even when the subject is tender: a contented couple with two children in the background, or a mother with a child, or a woman in a hat. They and hundreds more have a kind of power to them, with a sense not of melancholy but of what the passage of time means, of how the present will one day be a memory.”

Excerpt from Welcome to the Dollhouse, Town & Country by Michael Lindsay-Hogg.

Image: Gloria Vanerbilt, Carol in Silver Rose Dress with Cat, 2013, 17" x 22"