Poems From Here

Presented as a unified exhibition unfolding across two galleries, Alexandre and Candice Madey present Tessa Greene O’Brien: Poems From Here, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York. At the heart of O’Brien’s (b. 1982, Maine) practice is an expansive understanding of painting itself: she approaches the medium as an open field, where the only real limitations arise through self-imposed boundaries. Drawing inspiration from the Supports/Surfaces movement of the late 1960s and early 70s, color field painting, and folk modernism, O’Brien paints compositions that are at once atmospheric and grounded, where mood and structure hold equal weight. She paints what she sees and knows: the people, places, and environments to which she is intimately connected. This closeness grants the work an elasticity that enables her to move fluidly between attentive observation and experimental interpretation, where faithful renderings of light, topography, and detail coexist with looser gestures that register atmosphere, mood, and the emotional temperature of a moment. The works in Poems From Here emerge from O’Brien’s understanding of life as deeply interconnected and interdependent. As she began this series, events close to home and across the country required attention and care, making physical presence newly urgent. The appearance of the human figure within these landscapes reflects that lived awareness: bodies return not as symbols, but as participants in the same systems that shape land and memory. These figures are seamlessly integrated into her compositions, where the landscape is never treated as backdrop. In a number of works, a plant or tree occupies the central position typically reserved for a human subject, granting equal significance to vegetal and human forms and reinforcing the shared ecology they inhabit. O’Brien renders terrains shaped by geologic forces, ecological systems, and human intervention—landscapes where clearings recur as charged sites of action, wildfire smoke stains sunsets orange, and distant industry turns skies violet. Each painting begins long before oil paint touches the surface. "What distinguishes O’Brien’s work is its ability to hold together seemingly divergent traditions. Modernist inquiries into the material conditions of painting coexist with the intimate histories of domestic textile craft. Personal memory intersects with ecological awareness. Representation flickers in and out of abstraction. The canvas is at once image and object, landscape and fabric." —Annabel Keenan "O’Keeffe’s radical isolation, simplification, enlargement, and cropping of her subjects—approaches that were a consistent part of her artistic vision and in combination represent her personal language of abstraction—were utterly unique when she first introduced them in 1915, and remained so throughout her career . . . O’Keeffe’s art, no matter how closely it flirts with abstraction, is always rooted securely in the thing that she was painting. Thus, while many of her paintings are intended to be read as abstractions of her subjects, they are never nonreferrential or without a subject." —Jonathan Stuhlman, from Georgia O’Keeffe: Circling Around Abstraction

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