GALLERI URBANE

‘The Ecstatic Dream’
Anna Kunz

Opening Reception + Meet the Artist: Wednesday, April 9th // 6-8:30pm

“Last night I had an ecstatic dream. Suddenly before my eyes appeared fields and fields of wildflowers. They were passing by my eyes. Field after field, the meadows full of flowers in the most exquisite colors: blue, yellow, red, purple and they were all so real. I could almost smell them, like in my childhood. [. . .] I always had a very personal relationship with flowers.” — filmmaker Jonas Mekas (diary Oct. 9, 1997)

“What struck me was the revelation: in such a space, a random field of rogue wildflowers, it was impossible to feel anger. The scene and sensations in which he found himself immersed suspended anger. I felt that I wanted to focus on that for myself in the studio and turn once again to nature’s phenomenon as inspiration.” — painter Anna Kunz (email Feb. 20, 2025)

The exhibition of Anna Kunz’s new work is titled The Ecstatic Dream from a reflection by the avant- garde experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas. The reason for this reference is simple: Kunz created the work while in residency at Monira Foundation in Jersey City, which equally houses the archives of the Lithuanian filmmaker; more broadly the rightness of fortune is complex and deeply intuitive. From this encounter, what resonated with Kunz was the filmmaker’s approach, both diaristic and embracing chance.

It is interesting to assess in what ways Kunz’s own paintings are diaristic, given her process. “Each day I approach the painting in a ritualistic way: I choose one or two significant colors from an experience in the world,” she says. “So I’m making a document of my life in my work through color and surface.”

She is careful to note that it is not The Ecstatic Dream because she is clueless to the moment: there is an urgency in her non-urgency, as curator Jared Quinton once noted. Hers is not a utopian vision. Rather, it’s important to balance the feelings of anger and anxiety with freedom and even joy.

Kunz looks to artists such as Anne Truitt and Joan Mitchell, who also embed time and their lives into their work. But the proximity—specifically—to a film archive suggested a way for her to think about approaching painting with certain qualities of experimental cinema: not only its diaristic qualities but also the visual elements of focus (hard or soft), chance, movement, light, the effects of flickering, glitches and other distortions, the mode of engagement and the embodiment of time.

Take the plank you see upon entering the exhibition, a support with dual significance. It is the beam on which Kunz sits or walks in the studio as she traverses the canvases she lays on the floor. The paintings’ ratios, scaled intimately to her body and its reach, represent all of her possibility; this is a way of defining her parameters; it keeps her within a system. The plank also, here, holds seven canvases which, at about 11×13 inches, are head-size. Read left to right, they seem to move. Their compositions swivel or rotate with lucid dynamism. They are also like film stills, an embodiment of non-linear, subjective progression, without a clear narrative. And they seem to “arise,” like an image in a film: the necessity is created in the sequence of ephemeral, ethereal geometric abstractions, so luminous they would be iridescent if they could quiver in time and space. The gauzy layering and transparency of tinted aureoles thrum.Like in a film, time is a dimension. Linear time may belong to film, yet Kunz’s abstract paintings render almost tangible that embedded notion of time. It is the time of perception. Once you become more intimately involved with the surface and color, an optical experience occurs. There is a drift or dérive from the quotidian. This drifting is akin to film but also memory—the closest thing to the experience of being immersed in something beautiful and poetic without language. Kunz invites the viewer into the open space of abstraction, an invitation to step out of the familiar. Thus, an invitation to optimism.

Though diaristic, Kunz’s work is far from restrictively or solipsistically personal. We hover on the brink of bodilessness—and yet corporeality remains in the body as boundary and measurement. We are tethered, measured and bounded by the body in ways we feel and intuit. We are held—and liberated —too: by her formal response in this case to Mekas’ equally formal response to the real. We see her reading a fellow artist and human reading a field of flowers which is essentially reading the world. All of this within a continuity. It’s a cinema that is universal. In its participatoriness, it is feminist. In its vulnerability, care, and optimism, it is a balm.

Anna Kunz was born in Chicago, Illinois, where she continues to live and work. After receiving her BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago, Kunz went on to complete her MFA at Northwestern University, eventually attending the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Her works on paper, paintings, installations, and other compositions have been exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, New York, Madrid, and Poland. Kunz’s work has also been included in numerous public and private collections. Galleri Urbane has represented Anna Kunz since 2013. She is currently represented by Berggruen Gallery S.F, McCormick Gallery Chicago, Il and Alexander Berggruen N.Y. Kunz is the recipient of multiple awards and accolades, including nominations from 3Arts, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, Emerging Artist award from the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Artadia Chicago, Rema Hort-Mann Foundation’s Individual Artists Grant, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2020. She has been awarded numerous artist residencies, including the Golden Family Foundation Residency, Edward Albee Foundation Residency, the Space Program at Marie Sharpe Walsh Foundation, the Roger Brown Artist Residency, and, most recently, the Monira Foundation Residency. She is in the public collections of The Philadelphia Museum, Philadelphia, PA The Block Museum, Chicago, IL Fidelity Investments, Chicago, IL Toyota collection Dallas, TX and the Clements Collection of UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, among others.

‘Moon Bloom’
Sabrina Piersol.

Opening Reception + Meet the Artist: Wednesday, April 9th // 6-8:30pm

“In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilight turns long and blue …[Y]ou find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades …” — writer Joan Didion (Blue Nights, 2012)

Sabrina Piersol’s recent residency in the desert vistas of Pioneertown, CA turned into an extended (and intensified) chapter in her exploration of the color blue. The hue has become a predominant aesthetic obsession despite its slipperiness. It is interesting that the quest for color occurs at a transitional time: the artist turned 30 as she finished the work for the exhibition, Moon Bloom. At this juncture, Piersol finds herself bent on apprehending something fleeting. She and Didion attempt the same feat, to capture the ineffable that resides within the entirely phenomenological.

The title Moon Bloom, with its double “o’s,” represents in many ways the yoking of two recent experiences: residency and retreat, immersive focus and epiphany. The Pioneertown desert and the Rocky Mountains come together to create a similar emotional environment. She pulls from both, visually and psychologically, to create new landscapes.

There is also something lunar and crepuscular about Piersol’s work. She is a moon worshipper, she admits. The full moon, the glowing orb that is a hallmark of her paintings, is ethereal and yet grounds the composition. Metaphorically, it marks a transition zone: it belongs to the realm of blossoms that bloom at night, under the moon’s tutelage. It rules over moments of twilight, when the energy feels full of potential and also fleeting.

Such twilight spaces invite a “leaning in.” This “leaning in” is also characteristic of the Sapphic poetry that Piersol studied as a classics double major. She adores this lyrical Greek oeuvre that survives in fragments, its spaces of absence becoming gaps into which readers—like viewers—project. They are zones into which one might bring creation or simply accept the space between implicit and explicit. How is this different from the awe we might feel at her effort and ease: the effort to bring two entities together; the ease with which it is done? Ultimately, she makes space for the seemingly paradoxical. What she calls “gorgeous silent wonder.”

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