Ellen Heck, the next artist in our Southern Idiom sale series, is a Winston-Salem based painter.

On view through July 7

In her newest body of work, At the Well, Ellen Heck re-examines a long-loved masterwork, William-Adolphe Bouguereau's The Broken Pitcher (La Cruche Cassée), the portrait of a blushing girl leaning against a well with a broken water pitcher at her feet.

"Originally, I set out to decide whether or not I should allow myself to continue enjoying this painting, but already in the early stages of the project, I am again interested in rendering and placing theoretical forms in a believable world. Noticing the vessel-like qualities of the Klein bottle, which is a topological cousin of the Möbius strip with an added dimension, I have replaced the broken pitcher with this new form, changing the figures accordingly. In the language of math, a Klein bottle is described as a 'non-orientable surface with no boundary.' If that isn't something worth exploring, I don't know what is."

- Ellen Heck

About The Artist

Ellen Heck has received degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Brown University. She is represented by galleries in the US and UK and has been an artist in residence at Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA), Northern Print (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK), and the Rockport Center for the Arts (Rockport, TX). Her work is in the permanent collections of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, Stanford University, and The Cleveland Museum of Art. She lives and works in Winston Salem, NC and has taught intaglio workshops at Sawtooth.