The present work was one of a series of paintings that Lorraine Shemesh made in the mid 1980’s of everyday objects- shoes, socks, gloves and more playful things such as board games and beach balls.  These brilliantly colored “piles” in oil on large canvases or the exquisitely detailed drawings of the same subjects were painted at the same time as her well recognized “pool paintings”.

Shemesh was represented exclusively by renowned New York art dealer and avid collector Allan Stone from 1981 to 2011 and had 8 solo exhibitions in the eponymous gallery. Her work has been in solo and group shows at galleries and museums across the country, including at the National Academy of Design in New York, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and can be found in many public collections including the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio; the Boise Art Museum in Idaho; the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts; the Museum of the City of New York; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence, Rhode Island. Her work has been reproduced and reviewed in The New Yorker, Art in America, The New York Times, and Harper’s Magazine among others. She received an M.F.A. in painting from the Tyler School of Art and her B.F.A. Magna Cum Laude from Boston University and was elected to the National Academy of Design in 2005. Shemesh lives and works in New York City.