Praying Mantis Print

1923-2005 Barbara Gardner was born in 1923 in New Jersey and led a traditional life, working as a clerk and designer at an insurance company and as a suburban housewife. In 1960 she quit her job and began to pursue her art full time. It is the stunning contrast of the mundane exterior and vivid interior of Gardener’s life, so reminiscent of similar dualities in the life of Rene Magritte, that engages us and offers assurance that the high vision of surrealism may thrive as readily in New Jersey as in Belgium. That Gardner has studied her masters-Magritte, Delvaux, and de Chirico-is obvious. That she has created her own strong place, her own unique and visionary transformation, is obvious as well. We may glance at this triumph over the mundane adversities of life, and we all enlarged and ennobled by this victory.