Both Skies Open to Thunder

Henry Chapman & Natacha Mankowski
Valerius Gallery, Luxembuorg
January 13 - February 5, 2022

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

  • mixed earth, pale hills

    mixed earth, pale hills

    2021
    Acrylic and screen-printing ink on canvas
    71 × 55in

  • blue violet, violent pink

    2021
    Acrylic and screen-printing ink on canvas
    71 × 55in

  • night color, cold lake

    2021
    Acrylic and screen-printing ink on canvas
    71 × 55in

  • green square, blue water

    2021
    Acrylic and screen-printing ink on canvas
    71 × 55in

  • undead amaryllis, tree blossoms

    2021
    Acrylic and screen-printing ink on canvas
    71 × 55in

  • early fog, blue wing

    2021
    Acrylic and screen-printing ink on canvas
    71 × 55in