Breaking Bread: Thérèse Mulgrew - Wendy S. Rolfe,

Breaking Bread is a mother-daughter dual exhibition celebrating a family history of painting and congregation through the prism of child-like wonder and curiosity.

Thérèse Mulgrew and her mother, Wendy S. Rolfe, work in distinct artistic languages. Mulgrew’s photorealistic paintings celebrate a lingering fascination with shared meals and rituals, paying specific attention to the object. Her vignettes thrive in discretion. Rolfe, in contrast, employs a louder, more surrealistic symbolic library. Patterns, figures and animals with expressive eyes are set against traditional landscapes, evoking the playful imagination of a child.

Rolfe’s works reflect her perennial pursuit of childlike wonder and imaginative perspective, edified by her lifelong study of spirituality and theology. Conversely, Mulgrew’s works mirror latent observational reflections. Her undistorted moments, adult as they may be, are informed by the nights she spent playing around the frequent dinner parties her parents hosted. From the perch on her Rolfe’s lap, she watched the ways their guests navigated the tables her mother set—both literally and figuratively. Collectively, Rolfe’s perennial pursuit of innocence amplifies Mulgrew’s long lens of familial tradition. In bringing their distinct iconographies to the party collaboratively, they create with Breaking Bread a new memory both as artists and as family.