Leidy Churchman: Space Remembers at Matthew Marks Gallery

Leidy Churchman: Space Remembers fills Matthew Marks Gallery at 522 West 22nd Street in Chelsea through October 24. The show brings together thirteen new paintings and three sculptures, all made in 2026.

Churchman, born in 1979, lives and works in New York and Maine. Their subjects range across nature, contemporary media, everyday objects and a wide field of cultural signs and symbols. Group exhibitions including MoMA PS1, Fondazione Prada in Venice, Museum Brandhorst in Munich, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the 2022 Whitney Biennial have featured the work. Solo presentations have been held at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, the Boston University Art Gallery, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Hessel Museum at CCS Bard. A solo exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh is planned for next summer.

Five of the paintings are large, each six feet by nine feet, and each takes a distinct approach: a sprawling landscape, an astral gateway, an extreme close-up of a shell. One shows Churchman's home on an island off the coast of Maine, where unexpected residents appear. A cow rests in the foreground with a blueberry bush seeming to grow from its middle, two lobsters nearby, and the icon of a Buddhist protective deity floating above. Another canvas opens from a storm drain at its center, among dark clouds tangled with branches, vines, snakes, fish and birds, onto the spiraling chambers of a nautilus shell. A mirrored companion hangs close by, where an abstracted lotus parts the sky like a portal. Writer Alhena Katsof reads the group as turning ideas of home into a gravitational force, at once cellular and celestial, broken and whole.

Churchman frames the paintings as a continuing inquiry into consciousness and our capacity to perceive it. In Center of the Universe (Ratna), an idyllic mountain range sits against a zone of death and decay. At its center is the artist's own body, in pieces and disintegrating, a reference to the Tibetan Buddhist ritual of chöd, in which a practitioner visualizes offering their body for the benefit of all beings, including non-human ones, here represented by a bullfrog, coyote, brown bear and rock.

The title paintings form a Center of the Universe series (Padma, Karma, Buddha, Vajra, Ratna), joined by works such as The Trikāya, Purple Moon, Compass of Intuition and Eternal Pop. The sculptures are oil on wood or rock with found feathers, including Ocean of Space-Time Drag Queen Dragon and Snuggly Gem Caterpillar Bear Cub of Black Space.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM.