Eva Lundsager

Seeing Changing

Talley Dunn Gallery
August 26 – October 7, 2023

Talley Dunn Gallery is honored to present painter Eva Lundsager’s inaugural exhibition at the gallery, Seeing Changing. An exhibition of immersive paintings and contemplative works on paper that revel in unfamiliar and ever-changing space, Seeing Changing calls for viewers to see, to follow and linger on the fluid and expressive marks of the painter’s brush. Lundsager’s paintings are saturated with an exuberant sense of lively unearthing. Having come of age among the oak and hickory trees in the sprawling woods of Maryland, the artist paints with the quietude and delight of someone who is wholly present with their environment, content to observe the always changing and cyclical nature of things. Lundsager invites viewers to wander in her abstract and sensuous works suffused with reverie. They are expansive and atmospheric compositions that unfold organically and, although evocative of landscapes, deny easy discernment. The paintings remain unresolvable as most things in life so often do. Lundsager’s work calls for the stillness and contemplation needed to behold change and to welcome the range of feelings and emotions that arise in all their fullness and wonder.

With tight and loose brushstrokes, sweeping swaths of color, and meandering paths of paint, the materiality of Lundsager’s intricately composed paintings is captivatingly palpable. Lundsager is a painter’s painter. She paints starting with one form, then after careful consideration of that initial mark, intuits what comes next. In this way she moves from one mark to another in eager anticipation as she builds on the last, responds to it, and on occasion, sees humor in the juxtapositions. She paints with both intuition and intention—sometimes working over the span of years to fully realize a painting. The abstract forms of her paintings, especially in the works from her Invitation series, are animated with an effervescence just hovering above recognition but ultimately deny intelligibility. Unrecognizable to us, they contain life of their own—different forms that come together and move apart in varying degrees of relationship with one another and with us. Lundsager’s paintings are lessons in the enigmatic beauty that change offers, savoring what comes to the fore in the space between what is familiar and strange, known and unknown, resolute and uncertain.

Eva Lundsager (b. 1960, Buffalo, NY) received her B.A. from the University of Maryland and an M.F.A. from Hunter College, NY. Her work has been included in exhibitions at institutions such as the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, TX; the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA; and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Portland, ME. The artist’s significant solo exhibitions include Liquid Terrain, 20 Years of Works on Paper by Eva Lundsager at the Sheldon Art Galleries in Saint Louis, MO; and Elsewhere: Eva Lundsager at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, MD, where Lundsager’s exhibit was held in conjunction with an exhibition of work by her former teacher, Anne Truitt. Lundsager’s work is in the permanent collections of the Dallas Art Museum; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS; the Saint Louis Art Museum; and the Whanki Foundation in Seoul among others. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in painting, a Penny McCall Foundation Grant, and the MacDowell Fellowship. She currently lives and works in Boston.