Inherent Nature by Maya Frodeman Gallery

INHERENT NATURE

By Grant Wahlquist

In his underrecognized masterpiece Glamorama, Bret Easton Ellis’s protagonist, a model- cum-inadvertent reality star caught in a web of double agents, drops this little bit of wisdom: “The better you look, the more you see.” The line is classic Ellis, cryptic and cynical on first glance, obvious and profound on the second. The most beautiful among us have access to rarefied and exotic settings (their vision is broad); those who look longest and hardest see most acutely (their vision is deep). The crux of Ellis’s aphorism is the body.

In her poem The Outer—from the Inner, Emily Dickinson also centers the body in a reflection on the relationship between interior states, physical appearance, and the exterior world. “The Inner—paints the Outer—” on “[a] cheek—perchance a Brow[.]” Dickinson’s poem posits that our interior states register on the surface of bodies, leaving it ambiguous whether the bodies in question are our own or others’. Are your daily stresses painted on your brow as frown lines? Do you love your significant other because they’re beautiful or is it the other way around? Either way, Dickinson asserts, our interior lives are forever opaque (“The Star’s whole Secret […] [e]yes were not meant to know”)—the better you look, the more you see, but you’ll never see it all.

In Inherent Nature painter and curator Kathryn Lynch extends Dickinson’s and Ellis’s insights to the world of landscape. Lynch knows that artists are our best lookers (pun intended); painters know how to render the truth in all its subjectivity, and they do it by remaining with the objective world, whether the landscape or the objectivity we associate, rightly or wrongly, with abstraction. The longer (better) they look, the more we see, and—if the artist is any good—what we see is the artist’s own inscrutable interiority. From the Impressionists, who painted not the natural world but the visceral

experience of perceiving it, to the Transcendental Painting Group, who sought the spiritual lurking behind the material, painters inscribe inner life—theirs and ours—on canvas.

Lynch’s own paintings in the show manifest its organizing principal through their emphasis on light. In a manner that recalls Agnes Pelton, Lynch treats light as both physical phenomenon and analogy for illumination. Along with Nancy Diamond’s watercolors, which also emphasize atmospheric conditions, they slyly nod to the way that theories of vision inevitably involve light entering the body (our modern understanding) or leaving it (the emission theory of the ancients). In contrast, Will Gabaldón’s Alex Katz-esque oils have no identifiable light source yet capture the passage of time—segmented as it is into days, nights, and seasons—through subtle shifts in color.

Other painters in the exhibition push the interplay between psychological states and the landscape in nearly hallucinogenic directions. Donna Moylan’s Quel Giorno d’Estate sul Lago di Bolsena, with its doubling of figures on a horse separated by a stretch of exposed linen, has an “as above, so below” air of the pagan about it.

Lisa Sanditz’s Hudson River/Devil Pods/Barge also features a doubling—this time, the moon—though whether this is the result of a real aqueous reflection or an artistic invention is wonderfully unclear. Lizbeth Mitty’s Heat Lightning suggests both the ripe humidity of Summer and the night journeys by water of great gothic novels. For all three, the landscape does not illuminate but offers something literally and figuratively darker.

If all of the above conjures the specter of allegory, it materializes most concretely in paintings by Tania Alvarez and Deborah Brown. In Alvarez’s Fireflies, the outer world and its namesake insects are present only as a sideways glance; instead, we mostly see the rigid geometry of domestic space and a single unilluminated lightbulb. Likewise,

the beige triangle cutting across the corner of the image of a tunnel—one seemingly painted onto a solid surface as in so many Road Runner cartoons—makes A Way Out a darkly funny analogy for the futility of art itself. Lynch wisely includes two paintings by Deborah Brown, the pairing teasing out the meanings of each. In both Come a Stranger and Pale Horse Pale Rider, a nude female figure rides an archaic form of transport—a canoe, a horse—alongside a small canine companion. The latter painting’s title explicitly invoking the book of Revelation, the figures in Brown’s paintings traverse not only the landscape but also the boundary between life and afterlife. (I have always viewed the paintings of canoes by Lynch’s teacher Neil Welliver in a similarly existential fashion.)

Inherent Nature, then, for all its emphasis on the landscape and sparing representation of the figure, takes us back to the body, which is always both inside and outside of us, the place where the inner and the outer meet and touch, susceptible, fragile, and wonderful.

Tania Alvarez, TinyParticles(I+II) , 2022, Acrylic, graphite, charcoal and oil on panel, Top panel: 4 x 4 x 1 3/4 inches, Bottom panel: 24 x 24 x 1 3/4 inches

Tania Alvarez (b.1983, Sevilla, Spain) creates psychologically charged paintings and sculptures depicting everyday interiors and architectural spaces devoid of human presence. Working in a variety of materials and techniques, including sculpture, fabric, stone, wood, found material, collage, and painting, Alvarez’s work creates a chronicle of her life, both time-stamping the creations with self-specific objects while also manifesting an autobiographical structure for viewers to explore. Each piece serves as a narrative vessel, inviting viewers to reflect on their own experiences while navigating the cloistering effects of our contemporary digital landscape. Alvarez’s work explores the intersections of personal and collective memory, showcasing how individual stories contribute to a broader cultural tapestry. Her pieces often weave intricate narratives, which act as surrogates for the human experience.Tania Alvarez holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2017 and a BFA from Pratt Institute in 2005. She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and was an artist-in-residence at the James Castle House in Boise, ID; The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation in New Berlin, NY; The Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA; and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. Alvarez’s works are in the permanent collections of the University Art Museum at the University at Albany and the Boise City Department of Arts and History in Boise, Idaho.

Tania Alvarez, Echoed , 2023, Acrylic and oil on panel, 4 x 4 x 1 3/4 inches

Tania Alvarez, Fireflies , 2022, Acrylic, paper, PVC glue, graphite and oil on panel, 12 x 12 x 1 3/4 inches

Tania Alvarez, AWayOut , 2023, Acrylic, oil and charcoal on panel, 24 x 24 x 1 3/4 inches

Olive Ayhens, EnduringMountains,RelentlessLove , 1994, Watercolor on paper, 22 x 30 inches

Olive Ayhens (b. 1943, Oakland, California) creates inventive and personal interpretations of landscapes that amalgamate nature and man-made environments. Playing with spatial organization and scale, Ayhens compresses and stretches uncanny realms into fantastical visions of improbable places. For the past forty years, Ayhens has focused much of her practice on the creation of environmental allegories, each as whimsical as they are catastrophic, which fuse antithetical and imaginary worlds, warping viewers’ understanding of both space and place. She embraces the language and aesthetics of abstract painting in her focus on exploring color relationships, texture, scale, and the compression and expansion of space. Ayhens has long been praised for her willingness to allow realism to dissolve into pure abstraction in her color-rich, kaleidoscopic works in which linear perspective is not utilized to anchor space, but rather to destabilize it. Olive Ayhens was born in Oakland, California, and received both her BFA and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She has exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and internationally and is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant. The artist lives and works in New York City.

Olive Ayhens, Outskirts of Roswell , 2014, Oil on canvas, 44 x 52 inches

Olive Ayhens, LettuceLake, 2016, Oil on canvas, 34 x 36 inches

Deborah Brown, ComeaStranger , 2019, Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 inches

Deborah Brown (b. 1955, Pasadena, California) creates ethereal paintings that oscillate between closely rendered depictions of still lifes in the tradition of Dutch vanitas painting and more dreamlike figurative compositions, with many works focusing on nude women in watercraft or on beaches. Brown often removes any presence of men from her tableaux, privileging the subjectivity of her women and subverting the male gaze. She occasionally draws on iconography from canonical myths from the Bible and antiquity as well as fairy tales and science fiction. Presiding over the landscape as a solitary wanderer, Brown’s protagonist appears vulnerable yet powerful as if she has returned to archaic origins to write her own story. Deborah Brown received a BA summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from Yale University and an MFA from Indiana University. Her work is included in museum and private collections around the world, including the ICA, Miami, and the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, by donation from the Alex Katz Foundation.

Deborah Brown, Pale Horse Pale Rider , 2019, Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 inches

JoAnne Carson, GoldenSpinner , 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 43 inches

JoAnne Carson (b. 1953, New York, New York) creates exuberant paintings of unruly, hybrid trees that pull together allusions to Cubism, mid-century Disney concept art, and changes in the natural environment. Roberta Smith has said of Carson’s recent paintings, “each its own universe of botanical forms, electric color, visionary light, possible planets and pop culture references.” She explores these forms in two and three dimensions, known also for her large three-dimensional paintings that contain gutted TVs, chairs, plastic fruit, and other found objects, seamlessly integrated into her paintings as if they were never separate entities. For the past twelve years, Carson has devoted herself to crafting an intricate terraced horticultural habitat in Vermont, adorned with topiaries, fruit trees, and perennials. This endeavor not only revolutionized her perspective on landscapes but also left a deep imprint on her studio practice. Carson’s work resides in numerous prominent public collections, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Joslyn Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, Frederick Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, and Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, NE. Carson is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, the Louise Bourgeois Residency from Yaddo, and an individual artist grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Nancy Diamond, Green Hill II , 2020, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 19 x 23 inches

Nancy Diamond (b. 1962, New York, New York) presents the natural world in a heightened state and combines her ongoing interests in optics and pattern with direct observation and invention. When painting, she concentrates her gaze skyward, observing light and deepening colors that cycle from sunrise to sunset. Whether the inspiration is inanimate or sentient, Diamond’s subjects remain in a state of becoming, straddling the familiar and the alien. Her hallucinatory visons are tethered to realism, lending to works that are not totally unfamiliar yet are susceptible to and reliant on her imagination and instinct. Nodding to the work of Arthur Dove, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Helen Frankenthaler, Diamond’s trees, clouds, and flowers are at once familiar and unfamiliar, and often have taken on a subtle anthropomorphism. Nancy Diamond was born in New York City and earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design with a double degree in painting and film. Her work has been shown in exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Grants and awards include the National Endowment for the Arts grant and the Marie Walsh Sharpe/Walenta Space Program residency. She had been a long-time resident of New York City but now lives full-time in a mountaintop meadow in upstate NY, where she is an intimate participant in the infinite changes that take place season-to-season, day-to-day, and second-to-second.

Nancy Diamond, Sun Dots , 2024, Gouache and acrylic on wood, 13 x 13 inches

Nancy Diamond, Three Geese , 2021, Oil on wood panel, 12 x 12 x 2 1/4 inches

Nancy Diamond, Hover , 2021, Watercolor and gouache on paper, 19 x 23 inches

Jonathan Edelhuber, LandscapeWithinAStillLife , 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 29 x 33 inches

Jonathan Edelhuber (b. 1984, Arkansas, USA) creates work that is steeped in culture and art history, but also lends itself to pop culture. From his iconic paintings of skulls to his instantly recognizable still life paintings and sculptures, he continues along a path set by a rich lineage of artists who came before him. Occasionally branching off to explore new ideas, his paintings add a voice to this narrative and mark a certain point in this timeline. While he works with a large range of media and subjects, his process creates a cohesion between series. Line, color, and texture become the muse and bolster this language of painting he procures. Having lived in the South his whole life, much of his inspiration is drawn from the surfaces that abound throughout the towns and cities there. These textures from a lost vernacular become a main ingredient in his work. Jonathan Edelhuber received his BFA (emphasis in graphic design) from Harding University in 2007. He has participated in group shows around the world and has been the subject of several solo shows both in the US and internationally. He currently lives and works in Clarksville, Tennessee.

Jonathan Edelhuber, DogDays , 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 18 x 24 inches

Will Gabaldón, Trees and Cloud , 2024, Oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches

Will Gabaldón (b. 1978, Belen, New Mexico) depicts pastoral landscapes and environments in his paintings that he has observed over time and rendered from memory. Through painterly intervention, Gabaldón’s verdant scenes are simultaneously representations of real places and manifestations of what the artist refers to as “atmospheres left in memory.”

The work conjures images of places both real and imagined, utilizing concise brushwork, humble palettes, and the artist’s keen sense of memory. Bold brushwork is a significant element of Gabaldón’s remembered and invented landscapes. Described as the “rhythm of brushstrokes” in the artist’s words, they lead the eyes to sway back and forth across the surface, creating a sense of movement and energy in the silent scenes. Gabaldón received his B.F.A. in painting from the University of New Mexico and his M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. While living in Brooklyn, NY, he was a painting assistant for Jeff Koons, founding member of the artist run exhibition space TSA Gallery and was actively exhibiting work in many group exhibitions in New York. He has held solo exhibitions at The Journal Gallery, New York; Galería Mascota, Mexico City; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, Seoul and Dallas; TSA Gallery, Brooklyn, New York; and Harwood Art Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico. He currently lives and paints in Chicago, Illinois with his wife and two daughters.

Will Gabaldón, Centennial Hill with Snow , 2024, Oil on panel, 12 x 12 inches

Elliott Green, TheMeinYou, 2022, Oil on linen, 32 x 40 inches

Elliott Green (b. 1960, Detroit, Michigan) approaches painting with a sense of lightness, curiosity, and tenderness. With expansive depth and a variety of gestures, these images present energy, light, and color in roiling geological and atmospheric settings. Green conquers abstraction by shifting shapes that drift from the moorings of recognizable natural entities—clouds, mountains, and terrains. The elements are often in a state of dispersion, misting off particles into neighboring elements and airspaces around them. John Yau writes, “It was apparent that Green was working in a generative place where the tug between representation and abstraction never resolved itself, which is also true of the paintings of Claude Monet and Vincent Van Gogh. Green’s refusal to move definitively towards representation or abstraction has resulted in one of the most interesting and engaging projects undertaken by a contemporary artist exploring the subject of landscape in paint.” Green is the recipient of many fellowships, grants, and awards including The Shifting Foundation Grant, Salt Lake City, UT; Award in Art, The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY; BAU Institute, Cassis, France; Yaddo Residency, Saratoga Springs, NY; Jules Guerin Rome Prize, American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY; Yaddo Residency, Saratoga Springs, NY; Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, New York, NY; Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation Grant, Colorado Springs, CO and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, New York, NY. Elliott Green lives and works in Athens, NY.

Elliott Green, Wall of Sound , 2022, Oil on linen, 32 x 40 inches

Elizabeth Hazan, Some Trees , 2025, Oil on linen, 66 x 55 inches

Elizabeth Hazan (b. 1965, New York, New York) creates imaginary aerial landscape paintings that mix gestural topography with elements of modernist abstraction. Her work depicts a heightened version of nature off-kilter, evoking a charged atmosphere, familiar to the viewer yet verging on the surreal. Beginning with ink and watercolor drawings that she approaches like a stream of consciousness, she works from a hovering, aerial vantage point over an empty field and plays with looping lines and floods of color. Miming the border between landscape and abstraction, she draws from memory of open farmland and explores imaginative possibilities that spring from that land. Elizabeth Hazan was born and raised in New York City and attended Bryn Mawr College and the New York Studio School. She was awarded a fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and has twice been a resident of Yaddo. Her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Forbes, Two Coats of Paint, Art Critical, The Brooklyn Rail and The Art Newspaper. She serves as the founder and director of Platform Project Space in Brooklyn, NY.

Melora Kuhn, 2024, Oil on linen, 26 x 20 inches

Melora Kuhn (b. 1971, Boston, Massachusetts) investigates the human experience within the self and within society in her work. Re-examining American history, fairy tales and mythology, Kuhn takes specific images and alters them accordingly, in an effort to examine patterns of thinking and ways of being. Her interest lies in what was left out or forgotten, in the deterioration of a solid form or known history, in something that appears to be one thing, but is quite another. Melora Kuhn received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and continued her studies in Florence, Italy. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe and Asia and she has been represented by Galerie Eigen + Art in Leipzig/Berlin, Germany since 2011. Kuhn works in painting, sculpture, and installation.

Melora Kuhn, 2024, Oil on linen, 26 x 20 inches

Aubrey Levinthal, I-76Underpass , 2024, Oil on panel, 18 x 14 inches

Aubrey Levinthal (b. 1986, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) bears witness to everyday life in an almost meticulous manner in her paintings. Inherent to her self-portraits, as well as images of friends, family, and ephemeral moments she picks up in her neighborhood, is a slow and diffuse sense of time. Her works use a palette of light greens, yellows, ochres, pastels, as well as darker colors, and their perspectives are often dislocated, evincing an air of melancholy and emotional imbalance. Her paintings oscillate between beauty and disillusionment, addressing loneliness as an accompanying phenomenon of our life in late capitalism, which is oriented towards performance and efficiency. Recently the critic John Lau has described her as: “one of the most interesting and engaging figurative painters at a time when many artists are working in this vein.” But that alone, he continued, is not what makes this artist special, “what distinguishes Levinthal from her contemporaries is her ability to evoke a state that speaks directly our daily sense of unease and vulnerability …having shown each year since 2016, she has staked out a singular territory marked by melancholy, isolation, tenderness, and gentle humor.” Aubrey Levinthal gained her BA from the University of Pennsylvania State University in 2008 and completed her MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2011. Her work has been shown extensively in the United States, most recently at the ICA, Boston, in A Place for Me: Figurative Painting Now, and at the Flag Foundation, New York. Levinthal lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Kathryn Lynch, Moon , 2023, Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 inches

Kathryn Lynch (b. 1961, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) paints like a poet, evoking emotion through eloquent imagery. Though the places and elements that inspire Lynch vary from year to year and place to place, her method and her undertaking have remained the same. Her visual poems begin with moments wrapped in memory. Lynch uses these snapshots of memory and feeling to create dream-like and distinctly atmospheric works that capture the experience of being within and subject to nature. Painterly and patient, Lynch lets her unconscious unpack what it has seen – prosaic subject matter that, through excavation and simplification, emerge as transcendent testaments to essentialism and the universality of human experience in nature. Kathryn Lynch received her undergraduate degree from William Smith College in Geneva, NY, and an MA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1990. She was awarded the NYSCA/NYFA artist Fellow in Painting in 2018. She has been invited to Skowhegan, Yaddo, The Marie Walsh Foundation and The Vermont Studio Center. The artist lives in Catskill, NY, and works in a curated artist campus called Foreland.

Kathryn Lynch, SuperSunthroughTrees , 2024, Oil on canvas, 63 x 60 inches

Kathryn Lynch, Wildflowers , 2023, Oil on linen, 63 x 60 inches

Lizbeth Mitty, HeatLightning , 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 48 x 48 inches

Lizbeth Mitty (b. 1952, Queens, New York) grew up painting and writing in a family of artists, inventors and actors. Her body of work – described by New York Times critic Ken Johnson as a combination of “painterly verve and hellish beauty” – has long been concerned with examining and amplifying the intrinsic abstract beauty of overlooked corners of urban landscapes and interiors. The juxtapositions of conflicting images, such as man-made detritus and lush gardens, serve as commentary on a post-9/11 sense of impermanence and the imperative to consider the finite nature of the earth’s resources. The cyclical nature and mutability of things in times of excess are the subliminal driving forces in these works. Lizbeth Mitty received a BS and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1973 and 1975, respectively. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in both the United States and abroad and is held in public and private collections including the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The New York State Museum, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Zimmerli Archive, The U.S. State Department, and Trierenberg Holding AG (Austria). Lizbeth Mitty is a recipient of an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant. Her studio is located in Brooklyn, NY.

Donna Moylan, QuelGironod’EstatesulLagodiBolsena , 2023, Acrylic on linen, 40 x 48 inches

Donna Moylan (b. 1950, Boston, Massachusetts) employs strategies of depicting arthistorically richly emblematic iconography to make work where she reaches for the timeless questions of where we stand in relation to time, storytelling and personhood in art, philosophy and life. She is unashamed of her theatrically symbolic languages and motifs drawn for all eras of art history, from classic opera stage designs, painted ceilings from grand Venetian Palazzos and even science fiction movies with pseudo-scientific diagrams emblematic of the limits of rational thought. Each painting is replete with poetic titles in ways that call to mind classic literature and films, indifferent to barriers between abstraction and representation. Donna Moylan Moylan is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts of Boston. She began her career in Italy as a fine artist and has exhibited extensively through Europe. Her work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The New York Public Library, La Collezione Maramotti in Reggio Emilia and in the Museo Civico di Siracusa. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and in Kinderhook, NY.

Mason Saltarrelli, SongaTulipMightSing , 2024, Oil on canvas, 16 x 13 inches

Mason Saltarrelli (b. 1979, New Orleans, Louisiana) navigates a bridge between beings and spirit by engaging with a succinct collection of discovered and abstracted characters and syllabaries. Painting and drawing intuitively, his expressiveness articulates continuing, woven motifs which invite unlimited exploration from the watcher. Saltarrelli’s jubilant work transforms human, animal and inanimate beings into buoyant embracing remembrances in an ever-evolving carousel of shape and color. His work has been shown at Turn Gallery, NYC, The Mass, Japan, Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, LA, Meessen De Clercq, Belgium, Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY, Ace Hotel, New Orleans, Marvin Gardens, NYC, Galleri Jacob Bjorn, Denmark, Shrine Gallery, NYC, and Gallery 9, Australia among many others. Saltarrelli currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Mason Saltarrelli, BuoyantinAir , 2024, Oil on canvas, 31 x 25 inches

Lisa Sanditz, HudsonRiver/DevilPods/Barge , 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

Lisa Sanditz (b. 1973 St. Louis, Missouri) creates pulsating, vibrantly colored landscapes that capture the intersection between the natural world and the built environment and its effect on food production, consumption, ecology and the economy. Her works are rooted in a fascination of how we organize ourselves in a commercial world and how we value and commodify the landscape. This interest in the commercialized landscape has seen Sanditz focus on farming in America’s Midwest, junk food factories in Arizona and car manufacturing in Detroit. Lisa Sanditz received her BA degree from Macalester College, St Paul, Minnesota, later graduating with an MFA from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2001. In 2008, Sanditz was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Sanditz’s work has been exhibited internationally in the United States, Italy, China and Belgium and is included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas and the Columbus Art Museum, Ohio. In 2019 Sanditz was included in the publication Landscape Painting Now, edited by Tom Bradway.

Suzy Spence, Racertrack , 2023-2024, Oil and acrylic on canvas, 53 1/2 x 63 inches

Suzy Spence (b. 1969, Boston, Massachusetts) investigates and plays with the tradition of equestrian painting in her work. Finding artistic and conceptual inspiration in its aesthetics, metaphor, and cultural commentary, Spence creates paintings that touch on 18th-century society portraiture, political imagery, equestrian sporting art, and contemporary fashion photography. In her sweeping, intrepid brushstrokes and controlled drips, Spence conjures an air of defiance in her figures that feel alive and ghostly all at once. Spence’s work is charged with visual, historical, and theatrical dynamism as she explores both the intimate and nuanced, as well as the more traditionally rendered moments of equestrian life. While Spence’s work implicitly comments on themes of femininity, class, and kitsch these works present the equestrian lifestyle in earnest. Suzy Spence studied at Smith College, Parsons School of Design (New York and Paris), The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and earned an MFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York. Her work is in private and public collections worldwide, including the archives of Colin De Land’s American Fine Arts Co., held at The Smithsonian Archives of American Art and Bard College Library, the collection of The New York Foundation for the Arts, M HKA Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Belgium, The Grazer Kunstverein, Graz Austria, the Glarner Kunstverein, Glarus, Switzerland, The Zillman Museum at The University of Maine, and the New England Museum of Contemporary Art (NNEMoCA). Recently, Collector Oleg Guerrand-Hermes featured Spence in his curatorial project “The Frame” on the Lower East Side of Manhattan (2024). Spence lives and works in New York City and Vermont.

Suzy Spence, PoloParty , 2024, Flashe on paper, 26 1/2 x 34 inches

Suzy Spence, GoldenDodge , 2024, Flashe on paper, 26 1/2 x 34 inches

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

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JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING

TEL 307 733 0555

MAYAFRODEMANGALLERY.COM

Artist portraits

Tania Alvarez: courtesy of Brooke Burton

Olive Ayhens: courtesy of The RAiR Foundation

Deborah Brown: courtesy of Anna Zorina Gallery

JoAnne Carson: courtesy of DC Moore Gallery

Nancy Diamond: courtesy of the artist

Johnathan Edelhuber: courtesy of New Exhibitions

Will Gabaldón: courtesy of NYC Crit Club

Elliott Green: courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery

Elizabeth Hazan: courtesy of Jenny Gorman

Melora Kuhn: courtesy of Upstate Diary

Aubrey Levinthal: courtesy of the artist

Kathryn Lynch: courtesy of Lorin Klaris

Lizbeth Mitty: courtesy of Adhesivo Contemporary

Donna Moylan: courtesy of Bill Arning Exhibitions

Mason Saltarrelli: courtesy of GQ

Lisa Sanditz: courtesy of Huxley Parlour

Suzy Spence: courtesy of Erin Little

This catalog complements the group exhibition INHERENT NATURE

Curated by Kathryn Lynch

Maya Frodeman Gallery

04 April - 18 May 2025

Essay by Grant Wahlquist

Inherent Nature

INHERENT NATURE

INHERENT NATURE

FRODEMAN GALLERY

FEATURED ARTISTS

A GROUP EXHIBITION

INHERENT NATURE

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY

MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY