Mira Lehr is not a painter of this world. As the works which comprise Burnt Offerings reveal, she is fundamentally mystical in her vision. Lehr achieves her powerful expressionism not by resisting material nature—in the manner of a Rothko or Pollock—but by summoning it in a process of controlled transcendence. Hers is a nature that goes beyond nature. Her work’s ability to invoke at once the infinite and the infinitesimal, the intimately close and the inconceivably distant, in canvases which juxtapose the fragility of a leaf and the gravity of heavenly spheres, makes it the irresistible heir of Georgia O’Keefe’s cosmically magnified flowers, of Arshile Gorky’s other-worldly here-ness.

In works such as Morning Sanctuary and Chain Reaction, insinuations of petals and of planets establish a grammar for poignant visual prayer whose vibrancy echoes across galleries. Elsewhere, in paintings such as Treasure Map and The Power of Lace, the layering of abstracted foliage is movingly cartographic, as though constituting crumpled maps of the soul.

For her ability to weave veils of ethereal translucence from un-primed canvases, Lehr has been called the ‘Mistress of Light’. But what illuminates the paintings in Burnt Offerings is at once subtler and more unsettling than anything that has come before—like the last embers of a vigil. The smoky, tenebrous effect, in works such as Paths of Pompeii and Midnight Fog, is achieved by dramatically igniting gunpowder across the surface of works—as though the art itself, forged in dangerous times, were the only surviving relics of a great blast, the residue of self-combustion. The result is works of furious beauty, as though salvaged from fire—of something simultaneously sacrificed and saved.

-Kelly Grovier is a regular art critic for London’s Times Literary Supplement, where he first made reference to the work of Mira Lehr in a discussion of American Modernism and its legacy.

Kelly Grovier on Mira Lehr