Track 16 Gallery to represent
Roberta Gentry
Track 16 is pleased to announce its representation of Los Angeles-based painter Roberta Gentry. Gentry’s work constructs an intricate visual lexicon where botanical morphology, science fiction, and medieval iconography intersect. Her gently mysterious pictorial spaces are organized around historical systems of representation—ranging from the symbolism of Medieval tapestry cycles, Renaissance paintings, and architectural drafting. As her source materials are dismantled and reconstructed into rhythmic, luminous foundations for mystical compositions, Gentry examines how mythologies are built, sustained, and reinterpreted to make sense of human experience across time.
For example, recent motifs in her work have blossomed from a chance literary encounter, while researching gardens, with a c. 1450 painting by an unknown Old Master, The Madonna on a Crescent Moon in Hortus Conclusus. Its symbolism of Mary’s body itself depicted as an enclosed garden catalyzed an interest in the Marian cycle that eventually led her to The Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, which also speak to a morphology of female bodies, fences, nature, fertility, and innocence. “At least for me, these systems of mythology and symbolism allow me to process, and perhaps romanticize, my own experiences,” Gentry says—in her own way forging foundational human connections to history, science, literature, and nature.
Characterized by meticulous chromatic subtlety and optical precision, Gentry’s paintings balance structural armature with quiet sensuality. Fluted colonnades, unfolding plant forms, and heraldic symmetries dissolve fluidly into one another, creating vaulted, immersive spaces that reward prolonged contemplation. Over successive bodies of work, she is actively mapping an evolving terrain where ancient symbolic codes meet speculative futures, treating the canvas as a site of slow, spirit-infused world-building. She joins the gallery’s roster as an extraordinary example of an artist fusing narrative, symbolism, social conscience, and exemplary technique.
A graduate of the University of Arizona (BFA) and the State University of New York at Albany (MFA), Gentry brings a deeply considered intellectual framework to her studio practice. Alongside her exhibition history, she has been an active participant in Los Angeles’s independent art community as a member of the artist-run space Monte Vista Projects. Our representation marks an important milestone in bringing Gentry’s expansive, formally exquisite body of work to a wider institutional and public audience, establishing her position as one of the most distinctive and conceptually ambitious painters working in Los Angeles today.
