Warm Form. New Paintings by Beverly Acha

About

In her first New York solo exhibition, Acha introduces us to a language of abstraction that explores  structures of space and perception. Responding to shifts in her physical environment and landscape, Acha uses light and color to capture the ways in which place changes how we see and move through space.

In her paintings, Acha pulls from the systems that shape space and reality, from the forces that propel the earth’s spin and revolution around the sun, to dark matter’s role in the universe, and then back down to the architecture of our built environment, words, numbers, atoms, energy transferred in waves and particles. Each of these are associated with various types of formal abstractions: lines, grids, concentric circles, etc. In using these visual structures, Acha creates pictorial spaces that are at once shallow and infinite. Grids measure intervals, create rhythm across the surface, mark time. Gradations of color, intensity, and tone both open and collapse space, pull us in and out. To view Acha’s paintings is to access how they were made: we move through, within, and across, following their vibrations, wobbles, and breaks. Subtle asymmetries give us multiple points of entry. Inconsistencies and irregularities in the structure become tactile, haptic, and physical experiences of subjectivity. By engaging in questions of existence, experience, reality, and structures of space, time, and causality, her paintings give physicality to the intangible.