Christine Rasmussen: How the Light Gets In

Billis Williams Gallery is pleased to present CHRISTINE RASMUSSEN: HOW THE LIGHT GETS IN, the gallery’s third solo exhibition by the Los Angeles-based painter. The exhibition opens with a reception on May 9th and continues through June 6th.

Christine Rasmussen’s exquisitely quiet paintings transport and transfix.   Using the visual vocabulary of her surroundings to examine this moment, Rasmussen focuses her brush on minute details and the finest line work.  Her soft color palette is at odds with the industrial subject matter but the marriage of opposing forces creates a tension and magic in the work.

In these paintings, Rasmussen is dissecting and cataloging her environment to make order of the chaos that surrounds us at this moment.  Quietly evocative, the industrial forms are inelegantly elegant - Rasmussen coaxes a strange beauty from the old metal, glass, and concrete forms under the play of light and shadow.

Rasmussen continues to offer us the beauty in all things.  She reminds us that the sublime can be experienced anywhere - even in the most unexpected corners of our surroundings.  These paintings are a joy and a voice of hope - a path forward and an edifying vision.  Rasmussen shows us how to look, how to find peace, and how to exist in a world that is chaotic, unstable, and filled with hypocrisy.

These paintings are a revelation; they address the complexities of being human—how the hard parts break us wide open, allowing us to truly feel and practice empathy for others.  Grief and pain can shut us down or with work, can open us up. Rasmussen shows us how to find beauty in a cracked window, in the angles of light, in a railing, in the corner of a building or a stark shadow.  She shows us that ‘the cracks are how the light gets in.’

Christine Rasmussen (b. 1987, Karachi, Pakistan) is a painter contemplating attention, stillness, uncertainty and the sublime in the ordinary. An American raised in Pakistan, Vietnam and the United States, she earned her BA (Double Major - Art Practice and Peace & Conflict Studies) from the University of California, Berkeley. Rasmussen has exhibited in multiple solo and group exhibitions and art fairs across the US, and internationally in Amsterdam and Hanoi. Her work is in the collections of the Hilbert Museum of California Art, Imagery Estate Winery and private collections worldwide and has been featured in American Art Collector, Among Worlds Magazine, Artillery and Not Real Art among others. She has been awarded the New Artist/New Collectors presented by Bank of America at Seattle Art Fair, a Culver City Arts Foundation grant, Imagery Estate Winery’s Artist Label Program and a Chalk Hill Artist Residency. Rasmussen lives in Los Angeles and is represented by Billis/Williams Gallery.