Ursula Gullow
Tracey Morgan Gallery is pleased to present Nightbloom, our first solo exhibition of painter and mixed media artist Ursula Gullow. Join us for an Artist Reception on Friday, May 16 from 6-8PM.
Moving between classical painting techniques and craft materials, Gullow’s artwork embraces the decorative arts while reframing the female presence in Western art and rescuing historical imagery from its patriarchal forebears. Her richly painted tableaus and lustrous ceramic objects recontextualize sentimental narratives, innuendos, and adornments prevalent in European art history. Flowers, foliage, ribbons, petticoats, silk stockings, and ornamental filigree fill her oil paintings of landscapes and interior spaces.
For Gullow, the artist’s studio serves as both a sanctuary and a site of agency—a space where the act of making becomes a source of empowerment. She works across a range of materials and processes, incorporating plaster, ceramics, vinyl, and textiles into her practice. In tribute to the studio itself, Gullow’s ceramic tools—“glittershakers,” water bowls, and paint palettes—draw inspiration from 18th-century decorative vessels that were designed to display the wealth and status of their owners. In a similar vein, Gullow’s ceramic work reflects the richness of the studio environment, elevating its everyday objects into ornamental symbols of abundance.
Nightbloom draws heavily from the Rococo art movement, incorporating elements such as asymmetrical framing, naturalist motifs, and pastoral scenes of fête galante—romanticized courtship gatherings. Yet Gullow’s vision is distinctly contemporary: she amplifies color, narrative, and ornamentation, not simply as homage to art history, but as a way of challenging its rigid conventions. By hyperbolizing what has often been marginalized—decoration and sentimentality—she undermines hierarchies that have long privileged austerity and control in visual culture. Rather than striving for resolution, Gullow dwells in the liminal—in repetition, disruption, and invention.
Ursula Gullow received a BA in Sociology from the State University of New York at New Paltz, NY (1994) and an MFA in Studio Art from East Tennessee State University in 2024. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Asheville Art Museum (2019) and the Contemporary Art Museum, Raleigh (2022). Her social engagement project, One is a Crowd was produced and installed over a period of two months at Artspace, Raleigh, NC (2017) and she was a resident artist at the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts in the summer of 2021. Gullow has also completed artist residencies with The Gil-Society in Akureyri, Iceland (2005) and Jentel Arts Organization in Banner, WY (2019). She has twice received the North Carolina Regional Artist Project Grant (2009, 2019) and she is a 2020 recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund’s Money for Women Artists Grant. Gullow currently teaches at Western Carolina University’s School of Art and Design in Cullowhee, NC.
For image requests and press-related inquiries, email info@traceymorgangallery.com
Above image: Ursula Gullow, Satin Bows, Wet Toes, 2025, oil paint on canvas, 60 x 45 inches