IRIS SCOTT
Iris Scott has built her career around a fundamental question: must the paintbrush be the painting tool?
From 2009 to 2019, she committed herself exclusively to finger painting, developing a technique that eventually brought her to New York City, where she lived and worked in a renovated factory loft in Brooklyn. The city’s restless energy proved fertile ground for experimentation. Her work earned her representation with Filo Sofi Arts, and her 2019 Chelsea solo exhibition, Ritual in Pairing, attracted the attention of critic Jerry Saltz and publications including New York Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, and Artnet.
In 2019, the enchantment of urban life began to fade. Iris and her husband moved to a remote corner of Northern New Mexico, where they spent the next two years building a home and studio on 500 acres of wilderness. Yet the change in scenery did not produce the expected change in subject matter. Her paintings have rarely been mirrors of her surroundings. Most originate in imagination or memory, and despite living in the desert, remarkably few depict it. Her paintings are all made in oil, predominantly with her fingers. Between 2020 and 2026, brushes and palette knives joined her repertoire, introducing new possibilities without displacing the intimacy of painting by hand.
Iris feels a kinship with musicians, who move between genres, experiment with unfamiliar instruments, and resist the expectation that every album should sound like the last. Her paintings share that appetite for reinvention. Subjects shift, palettes swing from delicate to electric, and techniques are adopted, abandoned, or rediscovered. For Iris, painting has never been about perfecting a single recognizable style. It is about remaining curious enough to surprise herself.