Tanya Merrill: Land animal, house animal at 303 Gallery

303 Gallery in Chelsea is presenting Land animal, house animal, Tanya Merrill's third solo exhibition with the gallery. All the works are new, and the show runs through October 24, 2026.

Merrill works from a studio in the Hudson Valley and paints from direct observation of the ecology around it. Her pictures invent narratives that examine humanity's uneasy relationship with nature, as well as cultural depictions of gender and sexuality, seen through a contemporary lens. A thread of Americana runs through the work, alongside references to historical art.

The starting points here are a marsh hawk that crosses the fields outside her studio window each morning and the birth of her daughter in June. The exhibition imagines the weeks after a baby arrives as an in-between place, as if the gap between floorboards had widened and the household had dropped into it. Eventually the baby reaches for something new, and the family emerges to study the plants, animals and household objects around them as symbols waiting to be read.

Recurring figures, including the hawk, a horse down the road and columbine flowers bending in the shade, appear as familiar members of a cast, shown beside intimate portraits of people. Merrill works in oil and graphite on linen, thinning the paint so that it recalls the fluid immediacy of watercolor sketching outdoors in a notebook.

Nine paintings are on view, ranging widely in scale. Marsh hawk measures 30 by 24 inches, Horse at night 50 by 76 inches, and American Persimmon orchard (a Marriage of Dunbar and Wythe) is a long 36 by 96 inches. Others include Sleeping couple, Mother and child, A milking cow at Evelyn's dairy, Daybed at dawn and Waiting with Leo, along with the small Ryder's ship at sea, framed for their bedside (14 by 11 inches). Together they link parenthood, partnership and home life with the animals and plants that surround them.