Georgetown Gallery Guide

Paintings and sculptures carry us through time. They stay with us through generations, encouraging us to think and to feel, offering us perspective and peppering our lives with beauty. To find a connection with a work of art is a unique, remarkable experience; and while it has the potential to function as an appreciable investment, a work of art should, foremost, be acquired out of love, connection and passion for the piece itself.
This season, Georgetown and Dupont galleries are filled with a wide and brilliant variety of artwork. Seeing what’s out there – from new local talent to renowned glasswork and historic maps – is well worth a Saturday afternoon. Washington’s gallery scene is very much like the city itself: friendly and intelligent, beautiful and resonant, contemporary but historic. And with the holidays just around the corner, no gift is more powerful or more personal than a work of art.
Here are a handful of gallery highlights, representing the best our city has to offer this holiday season:

Cross Mackenzie Gallery
“Paintings by Rafael Torres: A Dialogue with Landscape”
Dec. 2 – Jan. 3
1675 Wisconsin Ave. NW
www.CrossMackenzie.com

Rafael Torres Correa creates lyrical universes in his large abstract canvases. The surfaces are reminiscent of radiantly glazed ancient ceramics: rich planes of glazed blue and turquoise, deeply resonant of the sea, punctuated with coppery flashes of bright colors like reflective sunlight. This mesmerizing depth and movement in the work is realized through overlaying washes, drips, dabs and splashes of paint.
Torres’s paintings evoke sense and memory, not dissimilar from the meditative, contemplative abstractions of Rothko, conjuring sensations of floating islands shifting in and out of focus from above. As uncertain shapes emerge, the viewer can almost perceive the contour of a distant land – perhaps a haunting gesture of the artist’s Cuban roots and his family’s journey to the United States. These landscapes are transitory territories and shifting metaphors, a state that parallels the artist’s own migrations and cultural identity.

Susan Calloway Fine Art
“Paris Rêvé: Nurieh Mozaffari”
Through Dec. 30
1643 Wisconsin Ave. NW
www.CallowayArt.com

As a young art student in Tehran, Nurieh Mozaffari dreamed of seeing Paris, the birthplace of some of the most significant artistic movements of the 20th century. But growing up during the revolution in Iran, she faced European tourist visa restrictions which prevented her from traveling to the place she most wanted to visit. In 1998, Mozaffari immigrated to Canada and could finally realize her dream of seeing Paris.
“Paris Rêvé” is an exhibition that represents Mozaffari’s 30-year love affair with the City of Light. Her use of gold leaf evokes the Baroque domes of 17th-century Paris, and her colors captures the famous “gris” of the Paris sky and the sparkling atmosphere of the immortally romantic city. Much like the Impressionism that challenged the Parisian artistic elite in the late 19th century, her canvases evoke an all-over sensation of densely laden atmosphere, punctuated with bursts of sharp focus, deeply affecting light and darkness and just enough geometric rigor to control the composition. Her forms are more abstract, but the effect is equally moving.

Jane Haslem Gallery
“New Drawings & Paintings by Tom Edwards”
Through January 2015
2025 Hillyer Place NW
www.JaneHaslemGallery.com

After 55 years in operation, Jane Haslem Gallery, long renowned for its representation of American print innovators, is hosting its last formal exhibition. Featured are the sprawling forest scenes of Tom Edwards. An installation of drawings and paintings in a variety of media – including pencils, ink, oil paint, ball point pen, even tea and coffee washes, carved into wet gesso mounted on panels and etchings – offers deep reflections into the intricate minutiae and consuming tranquility of the woodland brush.
To look at one of Edwards’s works is to stare into a dense and endless landscape, where branches tangle into dense and shadowed eaves. Their mysteries offer the same awe-stricken, sometimes eerie feeling of insatiable curiosity that the creeks and bushes hold for any children first venturing out to explore the wilderness beyond their back doors.

All We Art
“Navidad: Holiday Show”
Through Jan. 10
1666 33rd St. NW
www.AllWeArtStudio.com

All We Art is hosting a ‘ChristmArts’ holiday special exhibition, featuring affordable, tasteful (and occasionally adorable) fine art gifts for loved ones of any preference or style. From paintings, drawings and sculptures to jewels, bags, wooden artifacts and handmade indigenous wickerwork, there is something for everyone. With All We Art’s warm atmosphere and festive spirit, this is a seasonal event to relish.