I. Rice Pereira (1902-1971): The Nature of Space, an exhibition of 5 glass constructions from 1944-1952 and 12 significantly sized Lapis paintings of the 1960s, runs Nov. 15, 202 through Jan. 27, 2023 at D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc. in New York. This exhibition shows how Irene Rice Pereira’s exploration of light and space in her glass constructions applied to her later oil paintings.    

Pereira started working in glass in 1939 while teaching at the Design Laboratory, a WPA effort to establish a Bauhaus-style school in New York. There she had access to industrial designers, a workshop, and a variety of materials. Pereira painted geometric compositions on clear, hammered or fluted glass which she layered to capture light and movement. Six constructions were exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century in 1944.    

Pereira received a solo exhibition (held conjointly with one for Loren McIver) at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1953; the first women to receive solo exhibitions at the institution. In the lead-up to the exhibition, both Life and Artnews featured Pereira making her glass constructions.    

At the height of her fame, Pereira returned to painting in oil on canvas to produce large scale works, applying lessons learned from the glass constructions. The glass constructions were limited in size- the largest were 24 1/2 x 40 inches (such as Shooting Stars, 1952 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Mirror Image, 1952 in the Wigmore exhibition). Through the 1950s Pereira distilled her geometry while increasing her canvas size.    

Pereira understood the Atomic Age required a new understanding of man’s place in the world and expanding universe. She kept organized notebooks of ideas from ancient philosophers like Euclid and Plotinus, Enlightenment thinkers like Kant, 19th century mathematicians including Charles Howard Hinton, and recent theories by Carl Jung. In 1956 Pereira published her philosophy in the book The Nature of Space and included excerpts in the catalogue for her exhibition at Wellons Gallery in New York.    

Pereira knew her writing may not be accessible to all, so she relied on the beauty of her paintings to reach more people. Her ideas first came to her as poetry which then inspired the paintings. In 1957, she published a portfolio titled The Lapis, which demonstrated the evolution of man’s perception of space from primitive to ancient to medieval to Renaissance eras. In 1960, Pereira settled on a structured composition with a limited vocabulary of symbols (z-shaped lines, squares, and rectangles) on a tripartite field to explore how color, texture, and placement create a sense of infinite depth and mood. In the Lapis paintings, Pereira found a way to synthesize her artmaking, poetry, and philosophy.