Artists: Caroline Absher, Mario Ayala, Katherine Bernhardt, Michelle Blade, Andrea Marie Breiling, Mark Thomas Gibson, Daniel Heidkamp, Julia Jo
Exhibition title: Striking (Lightning) Blue
Venue: LOYAL, Stockholm, Sweden
Date: April 25 – July 13, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and LOYAL, Stockholm
STRIKING (LIGHTNING) BLUE
Caroline Absher, Mario Ayala, Katherine Bernhardt, Michelle Blade, Andrea Marie Breiling, Mark Thomas Gibson, Daniel Heidkamp, Julia Jo April 25-July 13, 2024
LOYAL is proud to present the group exhibition Striking (Lightning) Blue, a portal, a flash of light illuminating the space where abstraction and figuration interlace in painting. The exhibition brings together eight artists located across the US, creating highly specific and emotionally charged work to a new context in Scandinavia. This is the first show activating Loyal’s expanded upstairs gallery space in the Balcony Room alongside the Salon Room.
Striking (Lightning) Blue evokes an intense electric spark—the more blue the bolt, the hotter the charge. The name also suggests a “bolt from the blue”, an unexpected event where lightning strikes across vast distances, with no clouds overhead. Akin to these phenomena, each artwork in the exhibition is a bold expression within an abstract and figurative atmosphere, unfolding unique sagas throughout the gallery and together generating a powerful electrical storm buzzing with energy.
Caroline Absher’s The Rider unveils an androgynous figure in the foreground with flowing black hair, chin delicately resting on crossed arms, amidst a sea of swirling color shifting from dark to light across the canvas while another figure sails atop a black bat across streaks of pale blue, lilac, and a whirlpool of golds and greens. The abstraction of gradient and bold colors manifests the figure’s transient morality and power. Julia Jo’s All the Rage also harnesses crackling power. Jo captures the intensity of raw emotion through abstraction rooted in figuration by applying bursts of colored strokes to canvas.
Continuing the trail of sagas, Andrea Marie Breiling carves out an entirely new aerosol vocabulary humming with a balanced tranquility in her spray-painted canvases. Breiling’s paintings hang on either side of the fireplace, mirroring the intense movement of flickering flames in waves of orange and white and sheaths of deep purple and black, capturing an atmospheric pull and conjuring feelings of vastness through scale, movement, form, and color. Michelle Blade paints a fire-lit gathering amidst a forest that dissolves into abstraction. Blade’s wet-on-wet painting technique allows media to bloom across the canvas. Glowing sparks from the bonfire ascend into the night, mingling with the glitter of stars above. Trees also populate Daniel Heidkamp’s Fauvism-forward painting of wildly striped bark and light drenched canopies.
Both Katherine Bernhardt and Mario Ayala tap into bolted lines with animal figures hovering in the foreground, seamlessly merging the abstract and figurative. Bernhardt elevates the figure with her archetypal imagery, here a godlike pink panther, amidst a sea of magic mushrooms on a bed of white tiles, while Ayala draws from highly personal references and elevates them into something universal and sublime. Ayala’s Gentle on My Mind, a painting of his dog Bubba on a slick orange background crossed with bolts of smeared black, is reminiscent of Billy Al Bengston’s Untitled (Dracula Series). Referents to Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross are also present in Ayala’s painting and overall practice. Newman called for a new spirituality in art that wasn’t specifically religious, he believed artists should make cathedrals “out of ourselves, out of our own feelings”. Additionally, the paintings developed a central visual motif that had captivated the artist for a decade, the vertical line, a gesture he called the “zip”. Ayala integrates the zip motif and takes cultural references, including those that are hyper religious and codified, and extracts a sublime core. Mark Thomas Gibson rests a bouquet of metaphorically layered tulips on a richly toned field of black, addressing our deep need for beauty amongst the darkness that surrounds us. Ultimately, Striking (Lightning) Blue opens an epic of bold paintings brimming with abstraction and figuration, tearing through the gallery in potent surges of emotive power.
