Painting Catalog for "Aura"
@ Seattle Art Museum Gallery, October 2025
About the Exhibition
Elizabeth Gahan’s vibrant and detailed paintings explore relationships between nature and the built environment, public space and personal experience, as well as geometric and organic forms. The combination of vibrant colors, delicate line-work, ephemeral transparencies, and robust gel applications portray today’s landscapes in a state of fluidity and continuous transformation. In this new body of work, elements of nature play a heightened role in the narrative and compositions. In each view, nature is a prominent or central feature of the location. The built environment springs up around a body of water or weaves through the prolific foliage. At times, the locations in the paintings are on the outer edges of the built environment where a few structures, like a bridge or swimming dock, nod to the urban centers sprawling nearby. Other images portray locations that are quiet pockets within dense urban spaces.
Gahan's painting perspectives puts the viewer inside the landscape. This is achieved on a grand scale with “Wanderer Above the Valley.” The painting is so large, that when standing in front of it, viewers are immersed, positioned as if standing on the cliff overlooking the elaborate view. Viewers stand in the very place that the artist took the original photo and inspiration for the panting. The title is also a reference to “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” a famous Romantic era painting that epitomizes the sublime in art, a sense of greatness beyond all calculation, measurement or imitation, and a painting genre that embraced beauty, nature and imagination as powerful artistic strategies. For Gahan, first discovering Romantic paintings at the beginning of her own artistic journey, it was an influential example of how realism can be stylized to capture not just the visible landscape, but also the character and feeling of a particular time and place. In her own work, Gahan employs painting techniques, color stories, and digital tools that reflect current times and tap into our shared experiences.