Sophia Heymans, Xiaohan Jiang, Ann Toebbe

ANDREW RAFACZ is thrilled to announce _Sophia Heymans, Xiaohan Jiang, Ann Toebbe_, an exhibition of new and recent paintings from the three artists, in Galleries One & Two. The exhibition opens Thursday, September 17th and continues through Saturday, October 31st, 2026. The gallery will host artist-led tours of the exhibition with Xiaohan Jiang and Ann Toebbe on Saturday, September 19th and Sophia Heymans on Saturday, October 31st. _Sophia Heymans, Xiaohan Jiang, Ann Toebbe_ surveys the work of three contemporary painters who are connected by their dedication to world-building, through unique approaches to composition and a focus on material. Each has a practice centered on the occupation of place, and the way it is captured and explored in the painting's frame. Sophia Heymans' paintings explore the relationship between the land and its human occupants, illuminating the personal, meaningful, and mystical relationship we have with the landscapes that we inhabit. Incorporating both natural and disparate elements such as prairie grass seeds, mop strings, moss, and molding paste, their subtly sculptural surfaces are built up to create a visceral sense of immersion. Her interstitial figures exist in two worlds at once, conjuring simultaneous feelings of connection and solitude, while also often occupying the liminal space between seasons. Xiaohan Jiang reconstructs landscapes shaped by her memories and experiences with migration. Rooted in her childhood in rural northern China, Jiang depicts dry fields, low hills, shifting light, and distant horizons, allowing familiar and unfamiliar terrains to overlap between recollection and invention. Poetry informs the associative structure of her images, while the horizontal picture plane brings fragments of different places and moments into a shared space. Working in oil on jute, velvet, grass fabric and wood, she builds her layered surfaces in which forms emerge, disappear, and return. Ann Toebbe creates intimate domestic interiors through a diaristic approach to detail. Incorporating freehand painting, flat geometry, geometric abstraction, and intricate patterning, her multimedia works often include objects collaged on the surface, cut from paper that she paints in her studio. Drawn from both personal memory and cumulative research, Toebbe's paintings explore themes of family and class, speaking to our relationships with the places where we live and how they shift and become more complex over time. The gallery will release a bifold publication on occasion of the exhibition, with interviews from each participating artist, in conjunction with Chicago Exhibition Week, September 14-20, 2026.