Luft: curated by Maria Martin, Hannah Antalek, Jan Dickey, Julia Hames, Matt Macintosh, and Hayley Youngs

In 'Luft' a title that conjures breath, atmosphere, and the intangible forces that shape our perceptions—red is not just a color, but a current. Flowing through each work in this group exhibition, red takes on the role of a connective element: visceral, symbolic, and mutable. It is the heat beneath form, the flare of memory, the pulse of transformation.

 

The artists assembled here engage with red in ways that are deeply material and conceptually expansive. Matt Macintosh builds compositions that echo the histories of Western painting while simultaneously unraveling them. His sharp geometries and painterly tensions suggest red as both structure and disruption. Julia Hames introduces a more elemental red—grown, extracted, and alchemized from plants she cultivates herself. Her surfaces breathe, resisting permanence, and pointing toward a more symbiotic mode of creation. Red in Hannah Antalek’s speculative environments signals otherworldly change, casting her swollen, daisy-like forms in the alien glow of ecological mutation. Meanwhile, Hayley Youngs uses the color as an anchor within her spiritual cosmologies—landscapes that chart the emotional and philosophical terrain of a world in flux. Red becomes a guide, a danger, a meditation. And in Jan Dickey’s layered, sanded surfaces, red emerges as artifact—unearthed from strata of pigment and binder, a remnant of the paint’s own agency and will.
 
In Luft, red breathes. It stains, radiates, and recedes. It binds the artists' practices while moving freely between the rational and the mystical, the botanical and the artificial. This is red as atmosphere—dense, restless, alive.