Figure in the Field: Group exhibition | Curated by Jan Dickey

Opening Reception: Thursday, JANUARY 8, 6-8 pm

A field is an open space. Within it, the figure takes shape for a moment, distinct, and then falls back into the cover of the tall grass. Figure in the Field at Morgan Lehman Gallery brings together nine artists, working across different styles and media, who play with the conventionally established distinction between figure and field, subject and ground. For these artists the field is an active force which decides how much of the subject will appear and how quietly it will slip away into the uncertainty and possibility of hiding. The work speaks from the shifting margins of perception where presence, attention, and fact stalk us, uncommitted but curious, from somewhere in the open field.

Amy Applegate allows her still life objects to surface for a brief moment from the lushness of her paint strokes before retreating again into that soft oil, as if a face barely rises above water and then sinks unexpectedly. Yeonji Chung abstracts from daily life until her subjects become essentialized silhouettes pressed up close to the compositional frame, their layered edges delicate and appearing ready to dissolve into the surrounding field of color. Christine Jung presents an empty ceramic stoop marked by the glazed-on shadow of a tree that is not present with us in the gallery, a reminder that presence and absence can be experienced in the same moment.

Dan Gausman positions viewers inside sports arenas that refuse logic, where spiraling court markings on actual concrete unsettle our usual sense of balance, as we imagine our own figure trying to navigate the unfamiliar playing field. Claire Nicolet places us on a path that winds through a mystical blue field of patterned foliage, which flattens the viewer into a pictorial realm that is both landscape and decorative surface. Meanwhile, Amy MacKay creates paintings which appear as gestural abstraction at first glance, yet, through layered movements of color, unveil the ghostly trace of bodies moving through time and space.

Andris Kaļiņš reflects on the language of pigments, uncovering the histories and cultural associations which render paint color names and the paint itself as conceptual subjects living in a shifting field of social and linguistic reinterpretation. Allegra Toran uses fluid gestures of additive and subtractive drawing to merge representational subjects with their environment, moving the viewer between material surface and pictorial depth with each mark. Finally, Amanda Valdez produces a tactile oscillation between figure and field by centering bold figure-like forms upon her textile supports, even as the figures, made of the same fabrics, threaten to be reincorporated into the soft woven surface.

Across painting and sculpture, the works in this exhibition trace the movement between distinction and absorption: how a form holds itself apart, how it is shaped by the space around it, and how it ultimately returns to the field that made it possible.

–Jan Dickey, Winter 2026