Ines Carrizo has painted some of the most recognizable public art in Bellwater, including the largest panel in the Kestrel River Greenway's mural series, but until this weekend she had never had a solo gallery show of her own; that changed Friday when a Vale Avenue gallery opened a month-long exhibit of her studio work.

The exhibit, titled “Undercoat,” fills Ember & Ash Gallery’s main room with roughly two dozen studio paintings and preparatory sketches Carrizo made over the past several years, many of them early studies for murals that were never realized or were later altered significantly before reaching a wall. Gallery owner Nadia Kessler said she approached Carrizo about the show after noticing how differently the artist’s smaller studio work read compared with her large-scale public pieces.

“Everyone in this city has stood in front of her mural on the greenway,” Kessler said. “Almost nobody had seen what she does at a scale you could actually hang in your living room, and I thought that gap was worth closing.”

A different kind of exposure

Carrizo, a Bellwater native whose largest greenway panel depicts factory workers alongside laboratory researchers along a single continuous river current, said she has painted studio work privately for most of her career without seriously pursuing a gallery show, partly out of habit and partly out of uncertainty about whether the work would translate to a smaller, more intimate format.

“A mural has to work from fifty feet away, walking past it on a bike,” Carrizo said. “These paintings have to work from two feet away, standing still, with nothing else competing for your attention. I wasn’t sure I knew how to do that until I actually tried it.”

People assume because I paint big, public work that I don’t also make quiet, private work. This show is the first time I’ve let anyone see that the quiet version exists at all.

Ines Carrizo, muralist

A market test, too

The show also represents a financial test for Carrizo, whose income has historically come from commissioned murals and city or museum grants rather than gallery sales. Kessler said roughly a third of the works sold within the first two days of the show, at prices ranging from $600 for smaller sketches to $4,200 for the largest finished studio canvas, a pace she called unusually strong for a gallery debut.

“Most of what I’ve painted in this city, I did on nights and weekends around whatever paid the bills that year,” Carrizo said, echoing a point she has made previously about her mural commissions. “If this show does well enough, it’s the first time studio painting alone might actually be able to pay some of those bills.”

Bellwater Museum of Art curator Priscilla Adeyemi, who has worked with Carrizo on both the original greenway murals and a planned second phase extending into Riverside Heights, attended Friday’s opening and said she was struck by how much the smaller works revealed about Carrizo’s process. “You can see the murals being worked out in these sketches years before they existed on a wall,” Adeyemi said. “It’s like getting to read someone’s notebook after only ever seeing the finished essay.”

Adeyemi said she has already asked Carrizo whether the museum might borrow a handful of the show’s sketches for a future rotating display alongside the Ironworks Wing’s industrial history collection, an idea Carrizo said she is open to once “Undercoat” closes its run at Ember & Ash. “There’s an obvious conversation between those sketches and what’s already in that wing,” Adeyemi said. “I’d love for people to see both halves of that conversation in the same building eventually.”

Kessler said the gallery is already fielding inquiries from collectors outside Bellwater who heard about the show through word of mouth, a level of outside interest she said is unusual for a debut solo show by an artist who has, until now, worked almost exclusively on commission within the city. “Ines built her reputation one wall at a time in this city specifically,” Kessler said. “Watching that reputation start to travel past Bellwater’s own borders is something I don’t think either of us expected this soon.”

• “Undercoat” runs for one month at Ember & Ash Gallery on Vale Avenue.
• Roughly a third of the show’s roughly two dozen works sold within the first two days, at prices from $600 to $4,200.
• Carrizo is expected to contribute to the greenway mural project’s planned second phase into Riverside Heights.

Kessler said she hopes the show’s early sales success will encourage other Vale Avenue businesses to consider hosting work from local muralists and painters who have historically found few gallery outlets in the city. “Ines is proof there’s an appetite for this that Vale Avenue hasn’t really tapped,” she said. “I don’t think this street should be the only place doing that, but I’m glad we were the first.”

For Carrizo, the show’s reception has prompted an unfamiliar question: what to do with commercial success on a smaller, more personal scale than the public murals that made her known. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop painting walls,” she said. “But I didn’t expect people to want to bring a piece of that work home with them, and now that I know they do, I’d be lying if I said I’m not already thinking about the next one.”