Roberta Gentry’s paintings bring botanical morphology, science fiction, medieval iconography, and architectural systems into gently mysterious imagined worlds. After earning a BFA from the University of Arizona and an MFA from the State University of New York at Albany, Roberta settled in Los Angeles, where the landscape, climate, and independent art community became important influences on her practice. Her source material ranges from gardens and geology to Renaissance paintings and medieval tapestries. By dismantling and reconstructing these references, she creates luminous environments that explore how mythologies are built, sustained, and reinterpreted across time.

“At least for me, these systems of mythology and symbolism allow me to process, and perhaps romanticize, my own experiences.”

In her Los Angeles studio, Roberta begins with research, sketches, and carefully planned compositions. Historical images, architectural structures, plants, and symbolic forms are reduced into modular elements that can be repeated, mirrored, stretched, and reorganized. Although each painting is thoroughly planned, she allows its forms and relationships to change as the work develops.

Roberta builds her surfaces through thin washes of acrylic, layering translucent color over structured underpaintings. Fluted columns, vines, enclosures, and biomorphic figures emerge gradually through tonal shifts and precise symmetries. This slow process allows architecture and biology to dissolve into one another, creating spaces that balance order and sensuality, specificity and obscurity.

“I usually plan paintings out pretty thoroughly before starting work on them, but they always change a bit once I get going.”

In The Visitation (2024), Roberta arranges plant-like tendrils, fluted vertical forms, pointed enclosures, and twin suspended orbs around a central arched opening. A pale dome anchors the composition, while softened layers of green, yellow, blue, and red give the symmetrical structure an atmospheric, almost devotional presence.

The painting shifts between garden, architecture, body, and speculative machine without settling into any one reading. Through translucent color and carefully balanced forms, Roberta creates a space where historical symbolism becomes fluid, inviting contemplation of fertility, enclosure, transformation, and encounters with the unknown.

Roberta continues this investigation in Blood Orange, her first exhibition with Track 16 and a new body of work inspired by La Dame à la licorne (The Lady and the Unicorn) tapestries. Moving from the enclosed garden of her earlier paintings into a wilder symbolic grove, these works bring woven rhythms, heraldic figures, fruit, vines, and saturated red-orange color into increasingly sensual compositions. Blood Orange is on view at Track 16’s East Hollywood gallery through October 24, 2026.

Instagram