Selected Works

Miles McEnery Gallery is delighted to announce It Comes In Waves, an exhibition of new works by Karin Davie, on view 30 October through 20 December 2025 at 525 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated publication featuring an essay by Jane Ursula Harris.

When much of the 1990s art world declared painting passé (overshadowed by the rise of performance, installation, and new media), Karin Davie was among a new generation of artists that proved otherwise. Following her breakout emergence in the 90’s New York art scene, Davie has returned again and again to the “stripe” motif to depict anthropomorphic contours grounded by uniquely shaped formats, to create evocative forms. Influenced by the legacy of Abstract Expressionism, Op Art, and Post-Minimalism, Davie equally channels the forces that shape our everyday lives, with references to feminism, pop culture, and astronomy. Here, the striped contours become an instrument to explore the intertwined nature of the body, time, perception, and the cosmos.

In her newest large-scale works, each leviathan stroke is both a somatic and temporal record, preserving the sweep of her body in motion. Davie constructs pictorial spaces that mirror their making, embedding gestures in each mark: long corporeal strokes of fleshy pinks, blood reds, watery blues, and earthly yellows, conjure sinewy strands of muscle, tissue, the landscape, and electric waves of energy. In the Strange Terrain series, small drips spill over skillful lines, while diptych seams interrupt the undulating rhythm of her wavy fields. In her Trespasser paintings, enlarged thumb-shaped cutouts (a sly nod to Frank Stella’s cutouts and V Series) poke down to obstruct the brush’s path, echoing to form a serpentine spinal column running through the intense motion of waving peaks and valleys; part anatomy, part topography, Davie suggests a hypnotic reciprocity between landscape and body, bringing to mind the iconic 1966 Sci-fi movie, “Fantastic Voyage”, one she sights as an inspiration.

These paintings oscillate between presence and absence, spontaneity and choreography, process and image. In the space between such opposing forces, Davie illuminates a bridge between the physical and metaphysical, rendering a world at once unstable and wondrously alive. As Jane Ursula Harris notes, “this is the artist’s inimitable gift to us... Not only does she invigorate the legacy of abstract painting by doing so, one could say she liberates it.”