Mindscapes
For more than sixty years, artist Bascha Mon has explored themes of memory, relationships, identity, and nature through powerfully evocative works. Bookending Mon’s long career, this exhibition juxtaposes paintings from the 1970s with a selection of recent works on paper. While her early paintings reflect places from her past, Mon’s late works respond directly to her daily experiences and emotions, often referencing the current news cycle. Separated by more than forty years, both bodies of work originate in Mon’s unconscious mind—a practice that has driven her entire career. Mapping her memories and emotions, these works can be seen as metaphorical landscapes of the imagination, or “mindscapes.”
Mon’s early paintings reimagine places from her childhood in Newark, NJ, where her parents had a notions store on Prince Street. These compositions, which often resemble maps or aerial landscape views, have a fresco-like quality with their muted colors and scumbled surfaces. In contrast, Mon’s vibrant, expressionistic works on paper created in the last ten years are deeply connected to the music of French composer Olivier Messiaen. While Mon’s imagery emerges from her unconscious mind, her colors and gestures are guided by Messiaen’s music playing in her studio.
Mon calls her work “a blend of lavish color with abundant emotional content and a subtle narrative quality that relates the imagery to our shared realities.” In Bascha Mon: Mindscapes, the artist generously shares her personal reality and invites us to embrace our common human experience.