Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Re:place, a vibrantly evocative series of landscape paintings by Stephen Hayes. The works evoke the natural world in brilliant layers of color and expressive mark-making.
In his new body of work, Hayes uses Google Earth perspectives that recreate bodily vantage points. The artist finds digital views that resonate with his plein air painting process and the resulting scenes convey a sublime wonderment in beholding the power of the natural world.
With conscious deliberation Hayes’s paintings gorgeously entangle abstraction, representation, and conceptual considerations. The scenes of fields, rivers, and forests unfold with prolonged engagement and his artworks often upend a viewer’s preconceptions. The sheer beauty of the imagery is immediately seductive while the title Re:place invites further contemplation on broader themes of renewal, reckoning or reconsiderations of our place within these bucolic settings.
Stephen Hayes has shown his work locally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), The Art Gym at Marylhurst University (Marylhurst, OR), Northwest Museum of Art and Culture (Spokane, WA), American Culture Center (Sapporo and Nagoya, Japan), and The Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.). He has had several commissions for public art projects in the region, and his works can be found in the collections of Oregon State University (Corvallis, OR), New York Public Library (New York, NY), Portland Art Museum (Portland, OR), University of Oregon (Eugene, OR), and Randall Children’s Hospital at Legacy Emanuel (Portland, OR), as well as numerous private and public collections. In 2013 Hayes was the subject of a 30 year career retrospective at the Hoffman Gallery at Lewis & Clark College (Portland, OR), which included a fully illustrated catalogue. In recognition of his accomplished career and dedicated studio art practice, Hayes was awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.