Framed: 58 1/4 x 52 1/4 inches
artist
Irene Rice Pereira (1901–1971) was an abstract artist whose work reflected an interest in light, space and mysticism. She began her studies at the Art Students League from 1927-30 and then traveled to Acadamie Moderne, Paris for her last year of schooling. Becoming bored with the traditional academicism at the Acadamie, Pereira left for the Sahara Desert. There she encountered her first “vision of eternity”, which she attempted to incorporate throughout her artistic career.
Pereira moved back to New York City in 1932 and painted canvases based on the relationship between man and machine. Her first show was the following year at the ACA Gallery. Pereira experimented with nontraditional materials frequently and by the late ’30d she was painting on plastics and glass, adding marble dust to her pigments. During the thirties, she taught at the WPA’s Design library, bestowing many students with the influence of the Bauhaus School. In the 1940s, created multimedia paintings, superimposing layers of glass to explore the effects of resonating light.
By 1947, Pereira had mostly finished her pioneering experiments with coruscated and layered glass and had moved onto more complex oil canvases. The best examples of this later style are Green Mass at The National Gallery of Art and Mecca at the National Museum of American Art.
- biography courtesy of Djelloul Marbrook and The Caldwell Gallery, Manilus, NY
Description
Seed in the Sky with Fire is a luminous vertical composition that captures Irene Rice Pereira’s enduring fascination with energy, transformation, and the unseen structures of the universe. Rendered in warm tones of red, gold, and amber, the loosely structured elements are backed by soft bands of color, suggesting both an atmosphere and an ethereal, upward movement across a landscape.
The vertical format reinforces a sense of elevation and growth, aligning with the title’s evocative imagery, Seed in the Sky with Fire, which suggests a moment of ignition or genesis within a celestial space. As in much of Pereira’s work, there is a tension between precision and transcendence: the sharp geometry is balanced by the soft glow of color and the suggestion of space. The painting feels at once grounded in material form and open to metaphysical interpretation, embodying Pereira’s unique synthesis of modernist abstraction, spiritual inquiry, and cosmic imagination.