Lorraine Peltz at Gosia Koscielak

When parents die, issues surface. The survivors try to come to terms with the life just ended, as well as with their own. In the case of artists, their work may move in new directions. Such is the case with the painter Lorraine Peltz, whose mother grew up comfortably in Hungary, lost everyone but her sister in World War II, and then came to the United States, where she married, raised three children and had a happy life. Missing the culture that was destroyed, the elder Peltz triumphed by re-creating it as best she could in her new home and passing it on to her daughters.

Peltz was working through her mother's recent death in "Chandeliers, Starbursts, etc.," her exhibition of 16 oil-on-canvas paintings made in 2006-07. This work is transitional; there's no simple break between the artist's earlier exuberant paintings and the latest work, in which darker symbols have begun to appear. Many of the paintings combine imagery from the past and the present--and it seems likely that the work will continue to evolve.

Peltz paints bright color fields in loose vertical strokes. Layered on top and cascading down the canvases are daisies, starbursts, white lilies and other cheerful (often girly) imagery. Afternoon Delight (2006), whose title refers to a 1970s pop song, may speak of the artist's teenage years. On a vibrant orange background, childish daisies recall the Flower Children--or hippies--of the '70s. Inside a comic-strip speech bubble near the bottom is the outline of the lower half of a leggy woman in a puffy little skirt and very high heels, which may suggest Peltz's adolescent ideal of beauty. Speech bubbles in this and other paintings always contain visual material, never words.

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The draperylike, shimmering background of Stardust (2007) is a more somber dark blue, with a transparent chandelier lightly sketched on it. The chandelier simply floats in the middle of the painting; its chain is not attached to anything, as if occupying the ambiguous space of a dream or a memory. Peltz associates chandeliers with the elegant interiors in which her mother grew up. The artist also puts plums into some of her paintings, which she connects to slivovitz or plum brandy, a traditional digestif popular among Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe.

Peltz is a born painter and experiments extensively with color matching and effects. Her imagery is flat because, as she tells it, she "grew up on Hans Hofmann and Mark Rothko, color guys who reassert the picture plane."

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