Clouds, 4.24.2009 #1

Gourevitch began her ongoing series of Cloud Paintings at the onset of her career in the mid-1960s, and has been working concurrently on panoramic views of lower Manhattan since 2000, when she was an artist-in-residence on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center. In these studies, Gourevitch translates a traditional observational practice, one that was particularly popular among nineteenth century British painters like John Constable, into explicitly modernist terms, pushing the boundary between abstraction and representation. At once a self-reflexive meditation on the nature of painting and vision, these watercolors, which since 2001 have been largely based on memory, re-construction and invention, have come to offer a distinct perspective on the sometimes tragically fleeting nature of their subject matter.