Sarah Shepard Gallery is delighted to welcome California-based artist Serena Mitnik-Miller for her third solo exhibition.

Mitnik-Miller is known for her minimalist geometric compositions of interlocking patterns, lines, and organic, concentric shapes. She deftly uses subtle gradations of nature-inspired color — earth tones, grays, elemental blues, and greens — to suggest a kind of rhythmic liminal space, movement and a sense of ongoing transition.

Paradoxically, the compositions offer a sense of stillness as well.

For this exhibition, Mitnik-Miller dives deeper into her exploration of the square format, finding the possibilities of exploration within a consistently sized frame. Rather than confining or limiting, the square offers Mitnik-Miller the chance to play with balanced proportions and to reimagine designs or ideas that might earlier have been set within a rectangle. The consistency of format in the whole collection creates both continuity and space for variation within each piece. Similarly, Mitnik-Miller varies the amount of pigment in her colors, oscillating between barely there to deeper and more pronounced, discovering a sense of control within the notoriously elusive medium of watercolor.

Serena Mitnik-Miller’s works evoke the natural world she chooses to live, work, and play within, reflecting the colors of California’s distinctive environment. The earth tones are inspired by the sandstone she lives among and the greens by the abundant spring in California, this year perpetuated by rain. A surfer, she’s viscerally influenced by water, sand, and light.

Born in Massachusetts, Mitnik-Miller moved with her family to Hawaii as a child. She earned a BA in Photography and Printmaking from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work was exhibited at the Bolinas Museum in West Marin in 2019. A designer and a painter, Mitnik-Miller is the co-founder of General Store in San Francisco and Venice, CA, and the co-author of Abode: Thoughtful Living with Less. She was an artist-in-residence at Art Park in Byron Bay, Australia and her work has been extensively exhibited in New York, Tokyo, and Australia.

Mitnik-Miller is included in the Art In the Embassies collection in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. She lives with her two children in California.