I Rice Pereira

I. Rice Pereira (Irene Rice Pereira) , 1907-71, American painter, b. Chelsea, Mass. In 1935, Pereira helped found the Federal Art Project design laboratory and taught there for several years. Her mature painting style is characterized by the play of light and space through open, framelike forms juxtaposed against bands or lines in mazelike patterns. These suspended forms and ambiguous spaces are conscious efforts to express in abstract art the idea of fourth-dimensional space. Pereira experimented with glass, parchment, plastics, and other materials. A representative work is Oblique Progression (Whitney Mus., New York City). She was the author of several books including The Nature of Space (1956) and The Transcendental Formal Logic of the Infinite (1966).

Bibliography: See J. Baur, Loren MacIver, I. Rice Pereira (1953).

Pereira, Irene Rice (1901–1971). American painter, born at Chelsea, a suburb of Boston. After studying at the Art Students League, New York, 1927–30, she travelled widely in Europe, returning to New York c. 1933. During her travels she had studied with Ozenfant in Paris in 1931 and she shared his interest in mechanistic imagery and ‘unadorned functionalism'. By the late 1930s she had developed a geometrical abstract style (one of the earliest American artists to do so) and continued to explore this mode for the rest of her life. Generally she used rectangular and trapezoid shapes in conjunction with linear grids and loosely brushed textures, and sometimes she added layers of transparent or translucent materials to the canvas, increasing the sense of mysterious spatial effects. She came to see her art in metaphysical terms and wrote several books concerning her interest in light, space, and mysticism, among them The Nature of Space (1957) and The Transcendental Formal Logic of the Infinite (1966). Pereira taught at several colleges and universities in New York and elsewhere.