Nora Sturges: Fictional Spaces

An exhibition of Nora Sturges’s imaginative paintings opens in mid-February at David Lusk Gallery-Nashville.

Sturges paints small narrative landscapes in an evocative series that focuses on a particular item: ice, children’s toys, or other seemingly random objects. In this group of paintings, Fictional Spaces, Sturges depicts a night fallen world of arctic ruin, where the vestiges of a human presence seem 
to lie vacant and forlorn upon the ice. In some cases one wonders which is the more recent arrival
—the people or the ice? They convey a haunting sense of the precariousness of life on the edges of habitability. Sturges’s obsessively detailed brushwork, along with the intimate scale of her paintings, reinforces the quietude of these scenes.

Nora Sturges has exhibited her work widely in solo shows at museums and galleries across the country. She is the recipient of three Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her work has been included four times in the publication New American Paintings. She recieved a BA in studio art from Bowdoin College, and an MFA in painting from Ohio University. Sturges lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is a professor of Art at Towson University.