Talley Dunn Gallery

Ori Gersht’s Amalgamation series draws inspiration from a 17th-century still-life painting by Dutch artist Hendrik Schoock. Invited to create a contemporary response, Gersht recreated the alcove from Schoock’s composition, using it as a stage for his own floral arrangements. These works explore the tension between tradition and technology. Gersht photographs his bouquets at the precise moment of explosion—each image captured at 1/60,000th of a second using high-speed photography. This split-second event, invisible to the naked eye, echoes Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “optical unconscious,” revealing what lies beyond ordinary perception.

Talley Dunn Gallery is honored to present the opening of Time is Very Quick, a solo exhibition of lush paintings by esteemed artist Eva Lundsager. Time is Very Quick marks Lundsager’s first presentation of large-scale paintings on canvas at the gallery. Grounded in sensation rather than representation, Time is Very Quick makes space for viewers to connect with their own inner worlds by delving into the infinite cosmoses of Lundsager’s paintings. Often beginning with a single horizontal line, Lundsager’s paintings are developed intuitively, though it’s an intuition built on decades of looking, living, and painting. The artist’s first mark determines the next. Accumulations occur, get erased, then reformed as her compositions bloom through her acute attention to and relationship with the material. Large swaths of color buttress against areas of delicate line work, melting into organic forms, evoking rolling hills, still waters and atmosphere, or even plant life. The combination of transcendental images with Lundsager’s expressive mark-making speaks to the complexity of the human experience. In the painting If it (2024), broad and bright brush strokes sweep across the top of the canvas, revealing slivers of another world just beyond the drips. Below the heat of the orange and yellow sweeps of color are two speckled masses that seem to have split apart, one floating in the atmosphere above its counterpart, reminiscent of a parent and child, evolving organisms, or even body and spirit. Eva Lundsager’s paintings are full of possibilities. The artist’s use of movement, form and rhythm in If it (2024) creates space on the painted surface and within the viewer to reflect, contemplate and dream. While Lundsager’s layered compositions often feel otherworldly, the presence of the artist’s hand in the work, developed through thirty-five years of painting, is unmistakable and deeply personal. Through rich color, energetic line, and impassioned form, the artist honors the complexity of life in all its forms. In the series Here we witness (2024), a single blue line is stretched across four canvases. Evolving between each image and leaving traces of itself behind along the way, the blue line becomes more complicated as it makes its journey. Spans of red and orange hover above the blue line throughout the series, until finally the two become one in the final canvas. The mesmerizing blue line, much like a horizon line, denotes the distinction between two beings or worlds, and its surrender to the red expanse above relates to the transformations and changes that we might experience in our own lives. The continuous line in Here we witness gently carries the viewer through time and space, speaking to the exhibition’s title Time is Very Quick, which is an adage Lundsager’s mother-in-law would often say.