RACHEL MAXI
For about the first twenty years of her career, Rachel Maxi identified as a representational painter of urban landscape and still life. During this time, she often described her approach as “the diary of the mundane”: a meditation on beautiful quiet moments captured through careful rendering, composition, brush work and depiction of light. Around 2015, she was gravely injured by a car in a pedestrian crosswalk. That life altering event renewed her dedication to her practice and spurred her to pursue the body of work she has been steadily developing over the last eight years.
Her perspective has also been informed by six artist residencies spanning from Morocco to locations throughout the American West. What emerged from these spans of focused creativity is an alternative visual language and approach to art-making. Initially, she did not seek to put words to it, yet looking back describes it as a mystical, fantastical coded diary framed in explorations of nature, cities, memory and place — and as with her previous body of work, a meditation on the simple, but sacred act of just being here.
Rachel Maxi is a long time Seattle based artist working in painting, sculpture and various media. She was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she graduated from Xavier University in 1988, and came to Seattle after college in 1990. Her work has been shown in the Seattle and Tacoma Art Museums and is widely collected both publicly and privately.
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