Solo Series Spring 2026

Guizi Gao is a figurative expressionist oil painter whose work explores the human body as a mutable vessel shaped by social, biological, and psychological forces. She works in large-scale oil painting, fusing Renaissance and Baroque compositional structure with gestural distortion and layered, tactile surfaces. Influenced by the London School, particularly Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville, she treats paint as corporeal matter, building and erasing flesh-like forms. Her signature headless or obscured figures are stripped of fixed identity, transforming from portraiture into archetypal presences that carry social, emotional, and existential resonance. Gao's series *Realm of Chaos – Amazing Grace* are inspired by Daoist cosmology, tracing cycles of vital spirit descending into the body, awakening, self-tempering, and spiritual renewal. Figures dissolve into organic geometry, translucency, and childlike symbolic forms, reflecting the flow of qi (气), resilience, and the natural ascent of the heart-mind. The works engage themes of womanhood, pregnancy, breastfeeding, loss, and rebirth, presenting the body as both intimate and universal while highlighting the delicate balance between vulnerability and strength.

Stephanie Manzi is a painter based in Philadelphia whose artistic practice explores ecology through color, pattern, and material. Her work is informed by environmental observations from her childhood in Upstate New York and her experiences in the urban landscape of Philadelphia. She investigates how the brain interprets new images based on foundational memories, focusing on essential visual elements by breaking color into bands and surface into texture. Her current work reflects the changing patterns of daily life, incorporating responses to broader cultural and environmental challenges through layered, textured surfaces.

Ben Pranger's wall-based constructions assemble small pieces of wood to enclose and traverse space, following simple rules that unfold organically. Materials circulate and loop back on themselves to establish dimensionality, either opening as linear configurations or condensing into stepped pyramid-like structures. These labyrinthine architectures map recursive mental spaces that morph into evolving worlds. Over recent years, color and pattern have entered the work as refrain and code, woven throughout to form a constructed painting that operates as both sculpture and graphic system.