Leidy Churchman: Space Remembers

Matthew Marks is pleased to announce _Leidy Churchman: Space Remembers_, the next exhibition in his gallery at 522 West 22nd Street. The exhibition includes thirteen new paintings and three sculptures. Churchman is known for their wide-ranging subject matter, which draws variously from nature, contemporary media, and everyday objects, as well as myriad cultural signs and symbols. Writer Alhena Katsof describes the paintings on view as "turning notions of home into a gravitational force. Here, home is cellular and celestial, broken and whole." In five large-scale paintings, each six feet tall and nine feet wide, Churchman takes a unique compositional approach—a sprawling landscape, an astral gateway, a hyper-magnified, closely cropped view of a shell. One work depicts Churchman's home on an island off the coast of Maine, the pastoral setting permeated with unexpected dwellers. A cow rests in the foreground with a blueberry bush seemingly sprouting from its midsection, alongside two lobsters nearby. The icon of a Buddhist deity of protection floats overhead. In another painting, a central void emerges from the depths of a storm drain among dark, ambient clouds entangled with branches, vines, snakes, fish, and birds to reveal the swirling interior chambers of a nautilus shell. A mirror image hangs nearby, in which a portal-like, abstracted lotus flower seems to part the surrounding sky. Churchman describes their paintings as an ongoing investigation into the nature of consciousness and our ability to perceive it—a quest to expand what is knowable. In _Center of the Universe (Ratna)_ (2026), the artist juxtaposes an idyllic mountain range with an expanse that is host to death and decay. A rendering of Churchman's own body, in pieces and disintegrating, is at the center of the scene, a reference to the Tibetan Buddhist ritual of _chöd_. "A practitioner of _chöd_ visualizes offering their body parts for the benefit of all," Churchman explains. "This includes non-human entities, symbolized in the painting by the bullfrog, coyote, brown bear, and rock."