C. Grimaldis Gallery is pleased to present In the Night Garden, an exhibition of recent small-scale paintings by Baltimore-based artist Nora Sturges. Working in gouache, Sturges surpasses reality to enter a world of abstracted landscapes of color and form. In the Night Garden is her third solo exhibition with C. Grimaldis Gallery.

Inspired by the mystery and humanity of late medieval Italian frescoes, Sturges’s recent works merge a mystifying spatial context with solid forms to create a pathway into abstraction. Sturges builds her own worlds riddled with beautiful imperfections and clarity through layers of microscopic brushstrokes. Vast skies hold tangled shapes that interact like characters arguing, battling, and dancing across a gouache surface. It is with careful attention that Sturges reorients and transforms clues from Italian frescoes to create dense, otherworldly scenes imbued with the vitality and humanity that inspired them. By showcasing paintings no larger than 8 inches wide, In the Night Garden highlights Sturges’s ability to generate an intimacy with the viewer, allowing us to connect to our own humanity as well.

Sturges has received numerous awards and recognitions, including
four Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and four publications in New American Paintings. She was granted the Juror’s Award from the McLean Project for the Arts in 2011, and was named Best in Show from the Bethesda Painting Awards in 2010. Sturges has held recent solo exhibitions at Ejecta Projects (Carlisle, PA), Aughinbaugh Gallery (Grantham, PA), David Lusk Gallery (Nashville, TN), and Mount St. Mary’s University (Emmitsburg, MD). Sturges is currently a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Towson University (Towson, MD).

In the Night Garden will be on view from October 5 through November 11, 2023. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, October from 6 to 8pm. A fully illustrated catalogue is available; essay by Kristen Hileman.