Mary Reilly: Trees, Blooms and Tides

March 5–28, 2025

DFN Projects

16 East 79 Street, Garden Level, New York, NY

Opening reception: Wednesday, March 5, from 5-7 PM

Gallery hours: Monday-Friday, 11AM-4PM (or by appointment)

(New York, NY – Upper East Side) – Garvey|Simon is pleased to present Mary Reilly: Trees, Blooms and Tides opening March 5, 2025 at DFN Projects, 16 East 79 Street, New York, NY. The exhibition features a selection of Reilly’s work from 2022 to present, including new additions to her “Graffiti Trees” series. These recent drawings continue to examine the natural world at every scale, from sweeping vistas to intimate observations of blooms and bark. This is Reilly’s fourth solo exhibition with Garvey|Simon. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, March 5 from 5:00-7:00 PM at 16 East 79 Street, New York, NY 10075. The artist will be present. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM, or by appointment at other times.

Mary Reilly is devoted to drawing in graphite, her medium of choice. Her labor-intensive process of toning her paper serves as the starting point for her intricate compositions. She begins by using pencil to cover the entire sheet with up to eight uniform, unmodulated layers. This serves as a fertile ground for erasure-made highlights, and inscriptions of rich, velvety shadows. At once additive and subtractive, her technique allows her to create subtle shifts in shade and incremental gradients. As a result, Reilly achieves a myriad of tonal effects, exploring the chromatic spectrum available in a grisaille palette. Her methodology is also spectacularly diverse, allowing her to capture an array of climates and ecosystems–including New York City’s treasure troves of nature, Northern Vermont’s primordial wilderness, and Hawaii’s balmy coasts–with the same veracity. 

The selection of work in Trees, Blooms and Tides ranges vastly in its scope and scale, seeking to give importance to shore fronts and flower petals alike. Reilly elides grandeur and minutiae, driving delicate details and staggering, atmospheric elements into the same pictorial plane. She accomplishes this with the use of forced perspective, coupled with a mode of close, decentralized cropping reminiscent of impressionist painting. Though photorealist in nature, this handling of space lends a fantastical quality to Reilly’s drawings; not only dislocating her subjects, but rendering them almost enormous in scale. This is particularly effective in her drawings of blooms, wherein their vivid precision, compression against the very front of the foreground, and surreal atmospheric effects transform the flowers from quotidian to extraordinary. The same is true of the inverse: her more colossal subjects–breaking waves and ancient forests–are reproduced with nearly microscopic specificity. 

New York native Mary Reilly studied art at SUNY Purchase, the School of Visual Arts, the Art Students League of New York, and the National Academy School of Fine Arts.. She studied with artists Frederick Brosen and Sharon Sprung, who both work with graphite and often in photorealistic styles. Her work has been the subject of seven solo exhibitions in New York City, including Within the Woods: Landscape Drawings by Mary Reilly (2009) at the Museum of the City of New York, and over 25 group shows. Her work is on view in the New York Historical’s exhibition The Art Students League at The New York Historical, on view from March 7, 2025–July 13, 2025 on the Upper West Side. Reilly’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; The New York Historical, New York, NY; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR; The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; and Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. 

High resolution images are available upon request. Please contact Liz Garvey at liz@garveysimon.com or 917-796-2146 for more information.

ABOUT GARVEY|SIMON

Founded in 2010 in Chelsea, Garvey|Simon is a private art dealer and art advisory located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan by appointment.  The gallery curates exhibitions for their artists at various art sites across New York City, including DFN Projects on the Upper East Side and Artisan Lofts in Tribeca.  Elizabeth Garvey, Director, is a member of ARTTable and a founding member of the NY Chapter of the Association of Women Art Dealers, as well as a member of POWarts.  Garvey|Simon’s specific interests include works-on-paper, drawing, painting, and artists straddling the intersection of art and design.