NOVEMBER 15 - DECEMBER 20, 2025
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce ‘Daylight’, a solo exhibition of the latest works by Indiana based artist Rachel Hellmann. This represents the artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. Meet the artist November 15th from 5:00 - 7:00pm
“My paintings look to the daylight of domestic space as it is admitted through windows and doors, filtered through curtains, contained within walls, floors, ceilings, and revealed by the surfaces that reflect it, the colors and textures of architectural materials as well of the rugs, furnishings, and quilts that adorn them. The Daylight paintings, like rooms within a house, hold daylight and invite wonder.”
An essay by writer Eve Hill-Agnus accompanies the exhibition.
For more than a decade, Rachel Hellmann has made work that skirts the boundary between painting and sculpture, marrying three-dimensional elements with grids of color that exist in planes in her shaped paintings. Her works—whether on panel or paper—vibrate like forcefields of coherence and yet seem to hover inside a space constituted not by matter but only light and atmosphere.
For the body of work that constitutes Daylight, Hellmann has scaled up the dimensions of the wooden panels that she constructs herself, leaning on the legacy of her family of carpenters. Rather than solid, as previously, these panels are cradled and, in this, resemble the multi-panel pieces frequently created during the Renaissance—not imposing but expertly crafted.
Within this shaped frame, the forms the artist builds in ephemeral-seeming layers of paint are reminiscent of an interior architectural space, a nod to a beam or the corner of a window’s casement. “I wanted illusion to be created from the painting rather than the sculptural elements,” Hellmann has said about the work. In her hybrid forms—her sculptural paintings—the viewer constantly asks herself where painting rejoins three-dimensional elements. When architecture is both a volume and an illusion, what are the boundaries of illusionist space and objectness? Is that darker stripe a line of color or a shadow on the panel’s edge, created by its bulk?
(essay continued)
The illusion of time, like the illusion of space, is fugitive and evanescent. Cradled, multi-panel Renaissance works were perhaps conceived to be inherently portable but also permit and subtly create a more ample and complex narrative. Like the pages of a book, they suggest a linear temporality, frame some discreet portion of beginning, middle, and end. In Hellmann’s sequencing of color and light, one is also close to the notion of film scenes that engender narrative: the shadow entering or leaving a frame that suggests the moment before or the moment after. “I’m interested in that timing, that hover of time,” Hellmann says. Hover being the operative word: floating, lightness, or a kind of weather. “I love thinking about the edge of things—the moment when things seem to teeter just a bit,” the artist says.
One might say Hellmann is a rare illusionist who, from opacity, creates transparency and with it, the richness of resident ambiguities. Like clouds, ever fleeting, ever moveable, her paintings seem made from the elements of air and water. They create mirages of volume. And yet what one feels is no mirage, no illusion. Light and memory seem in dialogue with the container that is ever eluding us. How do you contain light in a moment that is fleeting? How do you corral emotional memory? The work is in flux, transient, ephemeral, and yet perfectly complete—approaching but never arriving, the way our emotional memory approaches but never equals the elusive containers of space and time.
Luster – 46 x 48 x 2.5
Watch:
Rachel checks in from her Indianapolis studio to answer some questions about Daylight
Rachel Hellmann is a multi-disciplinary artist who is known for her ongoing series of meticulously- crafted geometric sculptures and paintings. Working both three-dimensionally and on paper, the resulting forms explore the way in which the viewer’s perception is disoriented by the distorted sense of gravity caused by the careful interplay of geometry, light, and color.
Rachel Hellmann lives and works in Indianapolis, Indiana. She holds an MFA from Boston University and a B.F.A. from the University of Dayton. Hellmann’s work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally at a variety of venues including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA, the Zillman Art Museum, Bangor, ME, the Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA, the Elmhurst Art Museum, Elmhurst, Ill and the Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY. In additional to exhibiting at commercial galleries throughout the US, Hellmann has also exhibited internationally at Saenger Galeria (Mexico City), iGallery (Palma, Spain), Feria Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo (Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) and Kirk Gallery (Aalborg, Denmark).
Hellmann is the recipient of the Blanche E. Colman Award for Painting. She was also awarded residencies at the Ragdale Foundation, Playa, the Corning Museum of Glass and Fundación Miro Mallorca (Palma, Spain). In 2015, she was the Edward E. Elson Artist- in-Residence at the Addison Gallery of American Art and she was recently awarded a residency at the Kimmel Nelson Harding Fine Art Center in Nebraska City, Nebraska. Hellmann’s work is included in numerous public and private collections including the the Zillman Art Museum, Fidelity Corporation, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Morgan Stanley, Boston Federal Reserve Bank, Commerce Bank, Burke Rehabilitation Center, Cummins Inc, Eskenazi Health, Cleary Gottlieb, McDermott Will & Emery, William P Clements University Hospital (University of Texas) and the US Embassy in Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Hellmann was Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Northern Essex Community College from 2008 until May of 2013 when she relocated to Indiana to work full-time as an artist. Before joining faculty at NECC, she taught at Mount Ida College, School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Bunker Hill Community College. She has been a visiting artist at many colleges including: MassArt, Dartmouth College, Whittier College, Purdue University, Ann Arundel Community College, Ball State University and Rhode Island School of Design.