Inez Storer was born in 1933 in Santa Monica, California. She studied at the Art Center in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, the University of California at Berkeley, and the San Francisco College for Women, ultimately receiving her B.A. from Dominican University in San Rafael, California (1970). She received her M.A. from San Francisco State University (1971). Storer's work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions consistently thorough the United States at institutions such as the Reno Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, the Monterey Museum of Art, the Fresno Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Missoula Museum of Art, Montana, and The National Museum of Jewish History, Philadelphia. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout the country. Storer has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute (1981 - 1999), Sonoma State University (1976 - 1988), San Francisco State University (1970 - 1973), and the College of Marin (1968 - 1979).
She has received numerous grants and awards, including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1999, and has worked twice as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome (1997, 1996). Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Oakland Museum of California, the Lannan Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the de Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University. Recent exhibits: "Story Painters"; Squeak Carnwath, Hung Liu and Inez Storer at Bedford Gallery, Walnut Creek, CA. Grover Thurston Gallery, Seattle, Washington. Storer lives in Inverness, California and maintains a studio in Point Reyes Station, California.
Artist’s Statement
My work usually has an aspect of implied history, both through the use of the figure as well as objects that are a part of my "home" collections. The figures have a tendency to be slightly off balance, or passing from one reality to another. The absurd is of great interest, usually through the use of unconscious motivations. The figures can fill the landscape, either in a psychic way or in ways that are above gravity-pulled orientations. In using an imagined format of the surreal, I am able to work a more unreal world of fantasy. It does always seem to fantasy to me. There is oftentimes an attempt at an unrealized form of danger, close, in fact, to the real world...an emotional, sometimes physical precariousness. It seems to be a way of seeking clarity and identity through a parallel of sense of isolation. After all, I work alone in my studio almost every day. I usually start my work by marking the surface of the painting, adding more and more, then peeling away the surface to the first marks. It seems a metaphor of one's own life, as the future becomes enmeshed with the past.
Most of the time I enter my studio with an agenda, but then something happens, and I let the painting take me on its own journey. To be surprised while painting is the real experience, the reason to keep on doing the work. I have objects, bits and pieces, images cut from a myriad of sources and whatever I can collect that inform my work, or sometimes I actually attach materials of some kind to the surface of the painting. It is a way of going shopping every time I am in the studio. And artists love to shop in whatever form that activity can take. We are all like blotters. I am a blotter, absorbing all the different aspects of what I experience. Painting is evolutionary, and a grand experience.
-Inez Storer
Call us at (215) 247-1603
Inez Storer
Game of Chance, (2010), oil/collage on board, 52" x 40"
Making Adjustments, (2010), mixed media, 44" x 30"
Tulips #2, (2011), oil/board, 24" x 24"
Remember, (2009), oil & mixed media, 40" x 40"
World Map, (2010), oil & collage on board, 40" x 70"
