Second Street Gallery is pleased to present Tanya Minhas: Nature Tells Its Own Story, held from February 7 – June 10, 2020 (extended virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic) in the Dové Gallery.

Minhas grew up in Karachi, Pakistan, and moved to the United States to attend Princeton University. She subsequently attended graduate school at Columbia University, and the Arts Students League where she painted portraits in oils. Minhas ventured away from figurative painting, making repetitive drawings using ink, paint, and yarn about the unseen miniscule energies that subtly direct our lives.

Minhas’ work explores feelings of enforced separations, transformation, dislocation, entanglement, resuscitation and the contrasting and varied faces of beauty, destruction, rebirth, and love. Minhas’ medium of drawing is a visual expression of her own life force and spirit. She has a longstanding and continuous fascination with the etheric nature of life forces in all sentient beings. Her recent art practice explores the state of harmony between the internal and the external, the visible and the invisible, and how the strength of one’s intrinsic life force affects this harmony, offering an impetus to balance our internal lives with an increasingly tempestuous external world. She is interested in the composition and states of matter, and in its transformation, direction and redirection via forces that are unseen to the human eye but are fully experiential in their effect.

Minhas says of her work: "Each painting is about an invisible memory or impression left by the myriad different forces in nature - a leaf falling to the earth displaces air as it falls, tracing an invisible pattern, that I can see with my heart, or my imagination, or whatever it is in myself that finds these moments important, and yet I am unable to express the awe of it in words. Sand ripples are another example, that fossilized tell stories of environmental history, that immediately tell you about yesterday’s storm. Snowflakes as they melt transform states of existence; the movement from solid to liquid is a geometric change visible under a microscope. Thus in "Nature Tells Its Own Story" each painted story is historical, material, and ethereal, all at once.”

Minhas’s exhibition in the Dové Gallery includes a selection of new work completed specifically for Second Street Gallery. The show will be held simultaneously with By the Strength of Their Skin, the highly-anticipated exhibition held in conjunction with shows at the Kluge-Ruhe, Fralin Museum of Art, and the Rotunda at the University of Virginia. The exhibitions in both the Main and Dové Galleries mirror one another, both thematically and visually, and encourage a dialogue between the two spaces.

Virtual Google tour HERE.

EXHIBITION SPONSORS

The exhibition at Second Street Gallery is curated by Kristen Chiacchia and is made possible in part by Lia Norton and Michael Livermore.