Sandra Lerner

Mystic Realms

(Click on thumbnail for a large view and to begin a slide show of the series)

Paintings:

MYSTIC REALMS, 2004
 
Mystic Realms are magical, meditative paintings that have a subtle luminosity. "Lerner's paintings are clearly spiritual in import", says art historian Donald Kuspit, writing in the exhibition catalogue. "The overall-all geometry and atmosphere of Lerner's paintings - their tightly closed planes, sacred architecture and intense energy, just as indwelling - suggest their meditative character," he writes. "Clearly the central sacred structure — symbolizing the spiritual aspiration of the painting as a whole - is a meditative device."
 
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Exhibition Essay Donald Kuspit, Mystic Realms
Sandra Lerner's paintings are inspired by "M" theory—and Mark Rothko. The "M" is the three-dimensional membrane on which our universe supposedly grows, according to string theory. One of its developers, the physicist Ed Witten, asserts that "M" means "mystery, matrix or magic." One can read this to mean that the membrane is the ultimate mystery, or, as the title of one of Lerner's paintings says, the Ultimate Reality, that is, the reality out of which our more ordinary contingent reality develops. For it is the membrane covering a multi-dimensional space—the so-called "bulk"—in which there are parallel universes. In other words, the membrane is the matrix that magically generates—or, as I prefer to say, mystically, for it is beyond conventional understanding—every possible universe...
 
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by Donald Kuspit

All paintings are oil & mixed media on canvas.