Press Release

The exhibition Both Skies Open to Thunder presents new bodies of work by Henry Chapman and Natacha Mankowski, created in response to shared questions about ecology, landscape, and color.

French artist Natacha Mankowski (*1986) carefully selects and collects earth pigments in stone quarries abroad in order to make homemade paints in earth colors. The artist’s quasi-sculptural canvases, revealing an impasto technique, express her view on “ecosophy,”* an engagement with everyday ecological action. American artist Henry Chapman (*1987) paints on grounds made in his studio with oxide-pigments, repeating variations of a central form that suggest a color wheel or a clock. Screen-printed words, read clockwise from the top of each painting, make four-word poems about experiences of seasons, weather, and landscape.  

Taken from the poet Wendy Xu, the exhibition title speaks to the evocative thread between both artists’ work and nature:

Recorded a length of time
I held memory tightly
Unoriginal dimming
Of  the light there, a found scene

Number three on the dirt path
Father carries his school bag
Without use for meter, yet
Both skies open to thunder

Don’t speak to me of sorghum
Red fields, pressed up toward a sky
Whatever called to me there
Too wild, attempting a face

Old verses for my father
Dignify the cooling page
Black earth is the word it makes
Tilts forward, consequential