Screen View

Description

Surreal painted window or door screen painted with a view of a front yard and person waiting at the sidewalk gate. A seldom-seen form of the folk art, the painted architectural screen created a kind of augmented reality through which the interior viewer experienced the world outside, warping the landscape beyond in ripples of shimmering wire mesh.

Though rare, examples of painted screens materialize from time to time, but none that I have encountered depict such a banal, residential view. Painted window screens typically transpose idealized and picturesque views over humdrum exterior realities: pastoral scenes, turreted castles, and sailboats plying mountain-flanked rivers overwrite neighboring row houses.

But this screen offers something more commonplace, which makes it all the more extraordinary: it likely depicts the view from the very window in which it was installed. Looking through its frame, one imagines aligning the front walk and neighboring Italianate house within the perspective of their painted representations, the view of reality beyond indistinguishable from its facsimile with one exception: the transparent addition of a greyscale, shape-shifting visitor poised to enter the wrought-iron gate.

Note: The images here represent the work as a transparency, with shadows of the frame on the wall behind. The piece displays equally well suspended or hanging on a white or light-colored wall.

Condition

Very good.

Measurements

Approximately 30 x 36 inches.

Shipping

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