Miracle Paintings

Nicelle Beauchene Gallery is pleased to present _Miracle Paintings_, William Schaeuble's debut solo exhibition with the gallery. Schaeuble's paintings begin with the ordinary. People, places, animals, memories—the incidents that accumulate into a life. His subjects are drawn from the immediate world around him, yet rarely remain there. Through a compressed pictorial language and a particular blend of humor, tenderness, and absurdity, Schaeuble subjects the familiar to shifts in scale, context, and narrative, producing images that assume the quality of folklore or personal myth. Several works in the exhibition draw loosely from religious accounts of the miraculous, while others reference scenes from the artist's own life. The paintings bring together the sacred and quotidian without insisting upon a distinction between the two. In _Nap During Ascension_, a sleeping couple misses Christ's ascent into Heaven, leaving them dependent upon the accounts of others to establish what transpired—just as we are. In _Milkmaid (Drink Milk for Health)_, Schaeuble stages an equally playful and earnest reverence for milk and the women who produce it. The life-giving elixir and agricultural staple is here to remind us that birth is extraordinary, but so is The Dairy Barn at the Iowa State Fair. Schaeuble's work contests the assumption that the ordinary is synonymous with the insignificant. Instead, the paintings suggest that the miraculous may reside less in the occurrence of the impossible than in the capacity of an otherwise mundane moment to become, through memory and representation, irreducibly significant.