We are pleased to present New Work, an exhibition of paintings by New York City-based artist Colleen Herman, her third solo show with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view from February 8 until March 22, 2025. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Saturday, February 8 from 6-8 pm. Water, carrying lush and lucent pigments, runs, seeps, contracts, and collects across Colleen Herman’s untreated canvases. The lyrical play of color and shape, line and negative space, evokes the theatrics of the seasons and their elemental atmospheres. To trace the gradated fields and translucent washes to their vibrant, saturated edges is to trace the painting's formal progression. From the initial pour to the shoring of details with oils, the artist's process is preserved on the surface like a diary. Herman begins each work on the floor. Luminous soak-stains bloom beneath her hands as she both follows and guides the splay of watery gouaches and acrylics. Instinctual yet deeply considered, her movements are fully embodied and emotionally responsive. She envisions the residual images as the result of an ongoing engagement with an elusive yet indelible presence. This aspect of her practice, which straddles the barrier between conjuration and prayer, recalls surrealist painter and poet Alice Rahon’s observation that the “invisible speaks to us, and the world it paints takes the form of apparitions.” In this way, the capacious paintings comprising the pentaptych, Dance i-v, don’t function as pictures or portals as much as intimations of chimeras. Herman’s unwavering trust in her materials imbues the abstractions with a sense of inevitability and authority. Their rollicking, kaleidoscopic compositions, both freewheeling and rigorous, surprise and delight. Like a leitmotif in a symphony, a distinct vital green can be found in each panel. At the same time, specific gestures repeat but with variations like cloud formations, evolving and transfiguring as they pass from sight. Though the shapes and sputtering lines in Cymbals hew closer to recognizable forms, the unexpected palette estranges the fulsome flowers and tangled roots. The natural canvas is punctuated with sudden flashes of rose and restless streaks of chartreuse and seafoam green, while acidic tangerine flourishes abut pools of periwinkle and mahogany. Standing before the canvas, one can bear witness to a sprawling bouquet in all seasons: the stereoscopic layers simultaneously expanding and arresting the progression of time. After the water pours, Herman hangs the canvases upright and uses oils to delineate the wan splashes and stains. Or, as with Seasons, mask, manipulate, and reimagine them. Across the four panels arranged in a grid, ochre blue and indigo unfurl like an oil slick over a patchwork of pastels: peach, peony, and smoke grey. While the divergent modes of mark-making have an animating effect, the tension between varying opacities augments the composition’s emotional valence. Enveloped by the canvas’s inexhaustible expansiveness, the viewer is drawn into an experience that extends rhizomatically beyond the painted plane. At the interstice between intention and syncopated accident, the invisible interconnectedness that binds the sublime—the immaterial dance of color and light—to tangible matter—the telluric fabric of lived reality—becomes, if only temporarily, perceptible. Of the unseen, Rahon also said it “awakens in each of us that yearning for the marvelous and shows us the way back to it.” What could be more marvelous than a recovered sense of our own belonging, a renewed faith in our connection with, this, our one and only world? —Tara Anne Dalbow