Seven Sisters celebrates the opening of Janet Alling: Plant Life with a reception on Saturday, March 2, 2024, from 2–4 PM and an artist talk at 4 PM.
This marks Alling’s debut exhibition at Seven Sisters and her first gallery representation since the 1980s. With paintings dating from the 1970s to the present, this introduction to her verdant work highlights the artist’s devotion to nature as a serial subject.
In Plant Life, larger-than-life fuzzy begonia leaves sit near gardens of animated blossoms with cloud-filled skies. A pair of early Coleus paintings (1971 and 1974) display an almost anatomical botany, winding the viewer through the plant’s architectural stalks and into a network of dappled, veiny leaves. Later, more tightly cropped paintings from the Pattern series reveal the strangeness of repetition. Through recurrence, Alling’s representational range evolves from depicting her earthly subjects’ surface, color, and light to capturing the essence of their personality. Dedicated to a habitual painting practice driven by cyclical change and keen perception, Alling works “to reveal the dynamics and energy, the chaos, and the calm that nature reveals.”
A seasoned observational painter (and classically trained pianist), Alling has traditionally marked proficiency through technical virtuosity and time spent: repetition of a subject leads to mastery and a honed technique, and only then, to the freedom of improvisation. Now in her mid-eighties, Alling’s tenor is bright with a spirit of evolution, remembrance, and cutting loose as she arranges plants into ambient and boisterous compositions increasingly reflective of her unique vision.
“My mind processes through direct observation, perceiving each plant or flower and channeling this through my talent, skills, and knowledge of experiencing multitudes of fine art paintings of the past centuries...these have set high standards for me to achieve my way. They are not academic; perfection is irrelevant.”
-Janet Alling
After graduating with an MFA in painting from Yale in the mid-1960s, Alling settled in New York City, and first showed her artwork in 1972 at 55 Mercer, a Co-Op space in SoHo. In his New York Times review of the two-person show, Peter Schjeldahl placed her among a group of artists who were “advancing realist painting in an important way. Almost brutal in its scale manipulations and its assertions of detail, but full of acridity and sweetness of personality, work like Alling’s reintroduces us to the visible world with a bang.”
The natural world, ripe with life, decay, and adaptation, is an oft-visited subject for artists. In Janet’s–not your grandmother’s–botanicals, these are subjects in flux, more mysterious than romantic, zoomed in and sometimes out of focus. Supposedly, floral painting, like fashion, goes in and out of style, but Janet wisely focused on the evolution of her subjects over the years.
As happens, Alling was frequently unmoored from a full-time studio practice for most of her adult life, taking on day jobs in advisory, museum conservation, and arts administration. After selling her NoHo loft and retiring from a position in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s textile conservation department in the early 2000s, Alling relocated to a historic loft in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, where she continues to paint amid a hundred houseplants.
Janet Alling (b. 1939 New York City, NY) lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. Since childhood, Alling has been interested in the arts, utilizing the freedom of artistic expression that allowed her to process a turbulent past. Her experience at Yale expanded her knowledge of the arts and herself, allowing Alling to realize the freedoms she wanted in life and art. Alling first attended Skidmore College and transferred to Yale University School of Art and Architecture, studying under Alex Katz and Phillip Pearlstein. She graduated with her MFA in 1964 among a legendary generation of artists, including Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Anthony Phillips, Janet Fish, Rackstraw Downs, and Brice Marden. They turned contemporary art making into a revolution of material, scale, subject, and perception. In that vein, Alling focused on capturing and magnifying the natural world to redefine a category of painting long regarded as decorative and conventional. The Kornblee Gallery, NY represented her from the mid-1970s until Mrs. Kornblee’s retirement in the early 1980s.
In 2023, she was included in the exhibition Womanish: Audacious, Courageous, Willful Art at the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, and in the NY Studio School’s Annual Benefit Auction, as well as being a featured speaker in their Spring 2023 Evening Lecture Series. Past solo shows include exhibits at Newport Art Museum, RI; York College, CUNY, Jamaica, Queens, NY; St. Mary’s College of Maryland, St. Mary's City, Maryland; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Alling’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Rhode Island School of Design, Museum of Art, Providence, RI; NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine Collection, NY; Florists Transworld Delivery Collection, Southfield, MI; Fralin Museum of Art, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; Bank of America Art Collection; and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX.
Image: Janet Alling in her studio, 652 Broadway, New York, NY
Photograph by Arthur Anderson, c. 1975
