ART PARIS 2023

Baert Gallery is pleased to present a duo exhibition by Melinda Braathen and Sophie Wahlquist at Art Paris 2023.

Melinda Braathen’s painting seamlessly transitions between elements of skillful figuration and expressively ambient abstraction. This blending of genres, traditions, and techniques imbues the artist’s work with a unique sensibility that melds close observation of both nature and human dynamics with the theatricality and acute emotional attunement of pure expressionism. Braathen’s work stills and materializes the flux of life’s dynamic intensities into bodied abstraction of meditative paint swirled in masterful grooves of balanced coloration. The artist’s working process usually starts with her own photographs, taken outside in natural settings and often incorporating figurative elements. The photos are then deliberately decolorized, leaving only the contours of their constitutive parts in place, and meticulously transferred to canvas.

As a German transplant to Los Angeles, Sophie Wahlquist’s work combines the dueling sensibilities of a historically rich European lineage of figuration in painting and California’s sun-drenched prism on the natural world. Wahlquist’s paintings depart from a state of mind rather than from a narrative. Playing with different genres of painting and medium, new gestures and perspectives reverse existing ideas. She likes to negotiate the level to which absence can be replaced by clarity of something intangible or how the depiction of something recognizable can become a trigger for imagination.