Laura Andrew's Exhibition, Transparent Eye, Opens at Kolman & Reeb Gallery August 8

I Saw my Mother in a Bird, a Flower, the Sky oil on canvas, 30 x 72 inches

Transparent Eye runs August 8 through September 26 

Make and Take Demonstration by Laura Andrews August 15, 1:00pm-3:00pm

Artist Reception: Saturday, August 15, 6:00pm–8:00pm

Kolman & Reeb Gallery has announced its next Project Space Grant Exhibition, Transparent Eye, featuring new work by Laura Andrews. This new series of paintings challenges traditional landscape formats through shifting perspectives, layered compositions, and unexpected spatial relationships. Inspired by plein air studies and collaged imagery, Andrews invites viewers into landscapes that feel both grounded in observation and altered by memory.

Laura AndrewsAndrews’ paintings begin with the landscape, but they do not remain fixed in familiar formats. Rather than presenting nature from a conventional distance or horizon line, she shifts the viewer’s point of view. Many works are inspired by di sotto in sù, an Italian Renaissance ceiling-painting technique meaning “seen from below.” This perspective allows Andrews to reimagine the landscape as unstable and enveloping, creating the feeling of being inside the landscape rather than simply looking at it.

For this exhibition, Andrews' outdoor studies capture the changing color, light, and atmosphere of a specific place. In the studio, they become raw material for a more experimental process where Andrews cuts, tears, combines, and reassembles fragments of landscape imagery. From this process, separate views and experiences merge into larger compositions, creating what she describes as conglomerate senses of space.

Mirage mixed media on canvas, 24 x 84 inches

In this new body of work, Andrews uses large-scale oil paintings to create a more immersive experience. Rooted in the natural world, her paintings suggest trees, ponds, fields, and wooded spaces without depicting them realistically. Instead, she layers color, light, and form to create landscapes that feel remembered, shifting, and dreamlike.

Trip Mid oil on panel, 60 x 30 inchesAt the heart of Transparent Eye is Andrews’ interest in how landscape can be experienced, remembered, and transformed. Her paintings invite viewers into spaces that are not simply seen, but felt. They ask us to consider how light changes perception, how memory reshapes place, and how the natural world can become both familiar and mysterious through the act of painting.

“What excites me about Laura’s paintings is the way they shift our sense of space. Her compositions draw us in through light, color, and unexpected points of view, creating landscapes that feel both familiar and transformed. There is a beautiful tension in the work between observation and abstraction, and that tension invites viewers to keep looking.” Gallery curator and co-partner Jodi Reeb

Laura Andrews is a Minneapolis-based painter and educator who teaches drawing, painting, and printmaking at Minneapolis College. She began as a plein air painter, learning to paint on her grandfather’s tree farm. Her work continues to grow from observation, incorporating urban plein air, video imagery, and large-scale studio painting. Andrews has exhibited at the Phipps Center for the Arts, Silverwood Gallery, Duluth Art Institute, the Bell Museum, and Red Wing Plein Air.

Kolman & Reeb Gallery is in Studio 395, Northrup King Building,  1500 Jackson Street NE, Minneapolis.