Yvette Gellis: Toward Light and the Living Landscape

A mid-career survey of painter Yvette Gellis featuring immersive large-scale works exploring abstraction, landscape, and the interconnectedness of nature and human consciousness, with the debut of The Voice of the Glacier. About This exhibition brings together significant works spanning the artist's career alongside the debut of a major new work, The Voice of the Glacier, inspired by time spent in Patagonia. Working between abstraction and landscape, Gellis creates immersive environments that are not simply images, but living spaces of perception, memory, and transformation. Her paintings move through shifting atmospheres of light, layered gesture, and material presence, where beauty and fragility coexist with resilience and renewal. Balancing control with spontaneity, her process allows order and chaos to dissolve into one another, evoking landscapes that feel at once ancient and emerging. Often described as "futuristic ruins," Gellis' works explore the merging of the natural world and human-made forms, while reflecting on humanity's profound interconnectedness with the living earth. In The Voice of the Glacier, the disappearing ice fields of Patagonia become both witness and metaphor, suggesting a world in continual transformation, where air, water, plants, and human life remain deeply entwined. Rather than offering a fixed narrative, the work invites viewers to consider how the living world speaks through subtle shifts of light, atmosphere, and form. Throughout the exhibition, light serves as both material and metaphor: a generative force moving through landscapes, plants, bodies, and consciousness itself. Gellis' paintings suggest that living light exists within all forms of life, connecting humanity to nature through shared rhythms of growth, change, vulnerability, and becoming. Across this mid-career survey, the exhibition reveals an evolving practice rooted in wonder, spiritual inquiry, and the search for renewal within a changing world. About The Artist Yvette Gellis's paintings are not simply pictures of the world—they are immersive portals that challenge our very perception of it. Rooted in the visual language of abstraction and landscape, her large-scale works are spiritual, visceral, and formally complex meditations on the entangled beauty and precarity of our existence. Gellis, a Los Angeles-based artist with formal training from UCLA, ArtCenter College of Design, and an MFA from Claremont Graduate University (2008), has cultivated a distinctive voice through decades of sustained practice. From her studio at the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, she creates monumental canvases that pulse with energy, light, and mystery. Exhibition Celebration: Saturday, December 5, 2025, 5:00-7:00pm. Register for this event (Members free, Visitors $20). Read more Toggle Painting Installation