RARE Gallery is pleased to present Instants, Maya Brodsky's second one-person exhibition at the gallery. Her new series of paintings on panel explores notions of home in relation to the passage of time, the inevitability of change, and her solitary observations.

The influences of Vermeer, van Eyck, and Bonnard find a contemporary outlet and counterpart in Brodsky's intimately scaled, jewel-like paintings depicting inhabited and uninhabited interiors of homes that have played an important part in her life. Whether portraying a room within her Boston apartment, her family's Cape Cod vacation house, or her childhood home in Belarus, Brodsky infuses each space with a warm nostalgia that markedly contrasts with the presence of lonely figures absorbed in their own thoughts. For her, the act of painting is a way of "slowing down and looking at something very closely [in order to capture both its] strangeness and beauty."

What especially distinguishes Brodsky's work is her penetrating gaze which allows viewers to know precisely what her subjects are feeling and thinking, and her ability to imbue their living environments with the same powerful emotional content. Even vacant rooms retain a strong human presence in the artist's hands, as though the spirit of the occupant has remained after the person has departed. Brodsky's use of line, shadow, and color (just check out the folds in a bedspread, the colors of a rug or wallpaper, and the play of light on a wall) conveys a human and humane resonance as powerfully as any facial expression.

Born in Minsk, Belarus, Brodsky received an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2010, and a Post-Graduate Fellowship from the school in 2010-11. She was awarded an Acadia Foundation Artist's Residency in 2013, and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2014. This past summer a selection of her paintings was the subject of a survey show at the University of Maine Museum of Art. The artist currently lives and works in Cambridge, MA.