Measures of Intimacy

Uri Aran, Fran Chang, Nino Kapanadze, Kristy Luck, Marta Naturale, Therese Oulton, Emma Rose Schwartz Andrew Kreps Gallery is pleased to present Measures of Intimacy, a group exhibition that brings together a cross-generational group of artists whose practices address the mutable boundaries that separate the self from its surrounding environment, including Uri Aran, Fran Chang, Nino Kapanadze, Kristy Luck, Marta Naturale, Therese Oulton, and Emma Rose Schwartz. Drawing on a wide array of sources, from intimate domestic spaces and autobiographical details, to art historical references and the expansiveness of the natural world, the works included often take a fragmentary approach to representation. Mediated by both the artists’ own experiences and the application of paint itself, the familiar architectures are rendered uncanny, and recognizable forms and references appear to stop short of legibility. The resulting works relish in the generative potential of human perception, representing a composite of formal decisions, time, and shifting emotional states. Similar to the process through which visual marks are transformed into language, visible, fractional components of the works’ origins invite the viewer to engage in their own connection with the paintings on view; mimicking the interior dialogues and processes that bring the works from an interior space into fruition. In his practice, Uri Aran (b. 1977, lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) employs a diverse array of materials, pursuing the ideas of gesture, genre and language that have recurred throughout his practice by means of an expressive painterly language, in which marks and motifs spread across an expansive ground. Paint, oil pastel, graphite, wax and various household materials accumulate into elaborate systems which carry echoes of both gestural abstraction and minimalist painting, while also retaining the intimacy and tentativeness of the artist’s smaller works. Each piece collapses together painting and drawing to convey the impression of thoughts channelled directly onto canvas. Aran’s works layer expressive and semantic elements into condensed compositions that vary between dense systems and note-like intimations. The concepts of image, materiality, genre and notation are simultaneously invoked and deconstructed, disjoined into corpuscle-like fragments or layered into semi-abstract meshes, suggesting diaristic fragments or disarticulated thoughts. His individual works point always towards a larger ‘megatext’ or never-to-be-completed whole – referring to each other with an internal logic that reflects that of language or music. The poetic or narrative quality that underscores much of Aran’s work - whether his drawings, sculptures, performances or videos - is expressed in his works as a kind of poème simultané of chimerical and anthropomorphic images, akin to the unresolved phantasms that inhabit the ‘mind’s eye’. Aran’s work is currently the subject of the exhibition Untitled, I Love You on view at Madre Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples, Italy through May 18, 2026. His work was included in 2014 Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014), Liverpool Biennial 2014, Liverpool, and The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Venice (2013) Aran’s work is held in the permanent collections of American University, Washington, DC; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; ICA Miami, Miami, FL; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN, among others. Brazilian-Taiwanese artist Fran Chang (b. 1990, lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil) creates pictorial landscapes where the atmospheric vastness of the horizon meets the physical boundaries of the canvas. Her works evoke remote, inhospitable territories devoid of human presence and vegetation, unfolding ethereal, lunar-like settings defined by suspension, mystery, and a dilated sense of time, suggesting a projection toward the future and what lies ahead. Her use of silk as a painting surface, a material connected to her Taiwanese heritage, enhances the translucent quality of her compositions while revealing their structural framework. In doing so, she engages with the tradition of painting while extending its material possibilities. Chang reflects on the contemporary experience of nature mediated through digital imagery, addressing its intangibility as well as the ambiguous potential of silence and solitude. Her landscapes often suggest a world on the brink of disappearance, exploring both the human condition and an intimate dimension of the self. Drawing on memory, her works often juxtapose primordial terrains as they might have existed before humankind, with speculative future scenarios approaching abstraction. Trained in Visual Arts and having completed an academic extension program in Astrophysics and Astronautics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Chang’s practice also conveys a heightened awareness of humanity’s smallness within the vastness of the universe. Her work is included in the collections of the Saint Louis Art Museum (USA) and the Museu de Arte do Rio (Brazil). In 2020, she received the Arte como Respiro award from Itaú Cultural, and in 2025 she participated in the Taipei Biennial at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. Kristy Luck’s (b. 1985, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) paintings often begin with what the artist calls “anchors,” fragments of figurative imagery that feel bodily or architectural, evoking interior spaces such as the inside of a mouth or the depths of a cave. These initial forms - corporeal intimations like lungs, teeth, ovaries, or membranes - merge with landscapes and geological formations, shifting between micro and macro registers and gradually becoming obscured through layered pigments, rotations of the canvas, and deliberate acts of disorientation. As surfaces are constructed and dissolved, what once seemed legible transforms into abstraction. Elements overlap, penetrate, and fold into one another, collapsing distinctions between interior and exterior, body and landscape, intimacy and vastness. The resulting paintings exist within their own field of knowledge, mapping re-formed memories and locating false endings. In Luck’s work, the act of observing these forms becomes a reflective ripple — a private revelation shared between artist and viewer. Through this inquisitive process, she investigates themes of origin, facets of her identity that remain mysterious, movements of transformation, and ultimately the creative act itself, allowing the paintings to serve as both a mirror and a map of personal and perceptual inquiry. Kristy Luck’s work is currently included in Made in L.A. 2025, at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include Franklin Parrasch, New York (2024); Philip Martin Gallery, Los Angeles (2023, 2021, 2020); and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2022). Luck earned a BFA from Rockford University, Rockford, IL (2010), and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2014). With her paintings, Nino Kapanadze (b. 1990, lives and works in Paris, France) creates immersive sensory spaces charged with mystery and contemplation. Her often diaphanous works evoke dreamlike atmospheres where fleeting figures and natural elements seem to float, visible yet elusive. Light, color, and materiality are central; colors generate subtle depths and a suspended, almost sculptural presence. In her compositions, material and immaterial elements coexist; their evanescence and visibility interact across intimate and universal scales, where shapes and forms resonate simultaneously. For the exhibition at the gallery, Kapanadze presents a group of works that further articulate these elements through explorations of color, temporality and perception. In Secondbest, a complex flower rendered in antique red pigment becomes a meditation on choice and hierarchy. The work embraces immediacy and intensity, questioning the primacy of the “first” and proposing instead the value of the “second”, a subtle reflection on selection and validation. Color reaches a heightened chromatic concentration in ALL, where layered vermilion and related reds unfold in circular rhythms, evoking plurality and repetition while subtly recalling the fiery intensity of iconographic imagery. In contrast, Lovesongs centers on a pearl-like sphere painted in cinabre, a pigment historically associated with the Black Sea region. Though suggestive of a resonant Baroque interior, the painting absorbs rather than projects sound, conveying an unexpected stillness, as if music had been muted within its surface. Finally, Quarter To introduces a temporal dimension. The pictorial field appears divided and largely flat, yet slightly off-center an opening seems to emerge, a threshold that suggests anticipation, a suspended moment just before time advances. Nino Kapanadze holds an MFA from the Beaux-Arts de Paris, France, a master’s degree from Sciences Po Paris, and a Master of Architecture from the Tbilisi State Academy of Fine Arts, Georgia. Recent solo exhibitions include Villa Atrata Palais-Royal, Paris; Chapelle Saint Croix, Villa Atrata, Angles-sur-l’Anglin, FR; and Fondazione Bonollo Arte Contemporanea, Thiene, IT (2025). Marta Naturale’s (b. 1990, lives and works in Venezia, IT) practice is grounded in reality, understood as a field of continuous inquiry. The visible world becomes an object of investigation, something persistently questioned in an attempt to reach deeper forms of understanding. Unfolding through a kind of exploratory process, what appears familiar gradually reveals its layered complexity, ambiguity, and unresolved tensions. The idea of inhabiting a place and a moment, not only physically but existentially, permeates her work. Humanity emerges through traces: in domestic interiors shaped around human needs, in urban landscapes where anthropogenic structures intertwine with fragments of a seemingly domesticated natural world, and in gestures of occupation and care. What we encounter in her paintings is not the human itself, absent in its corporeal form, but the subtle evidence of its passage. Working primarily on a small scale, Naturale invites intimate viewing, compelling close observation and direct confrontation with the surface of the image. This proximity reveals the ambivalent nature of representation: while the painted scene opens toward an unlimited search for meaning within reality, the viewer is simultaneously brought back to the material limits of the pictorial surface. Marta Naturale graduated in Painting at the Fine Art Academy of Venice in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include Marc Jancou Contemporary, Saanen, CH (2024), La Quadriennale di Roma, Palazzo Braschi, Rome, IT (2023) and recent group exhibitions at Zero..., Milan, IT (2024) and Fondazione ICA, Milan, IT (2022). The first woman nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987, Thérèse Oulton (b. 1953, lives and works in London, UK) has developed across more than 40 years a distinctive painterly language exploring the tension between abstraction and representation, a dynamic reminiscent of the Romantic opposition between nature and culture. As Oulton has noted “Repetition is itself a metaphor since nothing can be repeated. Something is always a surrogate for something else”. This idea underpins her practice: images are reiterated across canvases with subtle variations, as if analog translations of digital data. Over time, her paintings have incorporated recognizable signs, symbols, horizons, and reflections, acknowledging both the visible world and geological crises. She draws from the weight of civilization, the physical and cosmic universe, art and music history, transforming this knowledge through spontaneous gestures that create complex and multilayered surfaces. While her works often suggest landscapes through dominant greens, blues, and browns, Oulton’s paintings are metaphorical, their titles offering alternative readings, almost as if the viewer is invited to suspend skepticism and navigate her labyrinthine marks. Motifs such as stalactite forms, dense foliage, and arched projectiles evoke dreamlike spaces, sexual connotations and tactile sensations, leading her work to blend intimacy, memory, and perception. Thérèse Oulton studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art (1975-79) and the Royal College of Art (1980-83). She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987 and has held solo exhibitions at Vardaxoglou Gallery, London, UK (2024); Pittsburgh Centre for the Arts, USA (1998); Marlborough Gallery, London, UK (1988–2010) Museum of Modern Art Oxford, UK (1986); Peterborough City Museum and Art Gallery, UK (1984). In 1990, her work was included in Aperto, 44th Venice Biennale, Venice, IT. Oulton’s work is included in various public collections: Arts Council of Great Britain, London; British Council, London; British Museum, London; The Metropolitan Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Fine Art, Boston, USA; Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, among others. Artist Emma Rose Schwartz (b. 1992, lives and works in New York) approaches the past not as nostalgia, but as a site of inquiry. For the artist, origin and autobiography serve as investigative tools, frameworks through which memory, identity, and image-making are continually re-examined. The characters in her paintings act as “fractals” of herself; mutable figures that merge personal references with imagery drawn from art history, pop culture, literature, cartoons, and family archives. Literary references frequently appear in her work, providing conceptual and narrative layers. In Pale Horse, Pale Rider, one of the works presented in the exhibition, Schwartz draws on Katherine Anne Porter’s story of the same name, using the literary source to explore themes of play, ritual, and mortality while evoking apocalyptic imagery through the title itself. In Idle Hour, architectural forms derived from Shaker drawings are rendered onto a cloth swaddle. Schwartz is drawn to the conceptual perspective of these drawings—the flattening of landscape into a vertical, two- dimensional space. By overlaying the buildings onto a loose fabric outline, she distances them further from their functional origins, transforming their simple lines and volumes into a decorative yet conceptually charged motif. Structures originally rooted in spiritual order and communal life are reframed as emblems of translation and displacement, reinforcing her broader investigation into how images carry and reshape memory. Her canvases unfold through a cyclical process that is both additive and subtractive; layers are built up, peeled back, erased, or washed away, allowing earlier gestures and decisions to resurface. Rarely using brushes, Schwartz works with her fingers, rags, and knives, emphasizing tactility and immediacy. The surface becomes a site of negotiation, marked by traces of both removal and application, producing a sense of continuous evolution. Figures appear suspended between emergence and dissolution, shaped by a material process that mirrors the fluid, fragmented nature of memory itself. Schwartz received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2014 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2019. Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin is currently presenting Giant Skeleton, on view from February 28 through April 10, 2026. Previously, she has had solo exhibitions at Brunette Coleman (London, UK), In Lieu (Los Angeles, CA), Annarumma Gallery (Naples, IT), and Chapter NY (New York, NY). In 2025 was artist in residence at Xenia Creative Retreat and in 2019 she received the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Venice Award.

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