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Artist: Elizabeth Reagh

The Painting Center presents True Fiction, featuring Elizabeth Reagh’s new portrait and figure paintings in the Project Room.

True Fiction refers to Reagh’s ongoing fascination with fictionalizing heads, figures, and scenes that begin with direct observation or photographic references. The small portrait paintings grew out of weekly Zoom meetings in which one participant sat for the length of a song (2-5 minutes) while the others drew. The 10-15 drawings per session grew to hundreds, inspiring Reagh to revisit an interest in imagined portrait painting. This time, the drawings provided a starting point, something to further develop or something to destroy and remake or a combination of both. Some of the final works remain quite close to the Zoom drawings; others look nothing like the original reference. The small size of the canvases and specific subject matter allowed for experimentation, quick and dramatic changes, and, over the period of several years, a relatively large number of paintings. Reagh began to see patterns emerging—themes around self and her interior life, as well as formal painting patterns and habitual visual responses. She began consciously to challenge her process, in the way one might try to challenge one's psychological responses when in therapy. Like therapy, it was difficult and revealing.

The figure paintings grew out of a desire to merge familiar scenes and various figures in one painting using different references. The process, like the portrait painting process, was exploratory and inventive. The scenes were based on real life— snapshots of familiar surroundings, in which Reagh incorporated people she knows, people she doesn’t know, and people who are purely imagined. She is drawn to the banal as well as the strange and unexpected. The two bodies of work represent variations on a theme: taking what is visible and allowing something new and surprising to emerge.

Elizabeth Reagh received a BFA from San Francisco State University and an MFA from the University of Oregon. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally. She shows regularly at B Sakata Garo in Sacramento, CA. She will be having a solo show there in 2028.

Elizabeth Reagh, Crow and Chandru, 2025, Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 inches