Bortolami Gallery is pleased to present a three-person exhibition with Barbana Bojadzi, Jake Grewal, and Cole Lu in the Upstairs.

The show features new paintings, including a three-part fifteen-foot work, by London-based artist Jake Grewal, a constellation of burnt birch panels by Cole Lu, and introduces Kosovan artist Barbana Bojadzi’s multimedia works on rigid insulation sheeting. Within their variety of methods, the artists each mine the elements, capturing our collective and primordial response to the natural world. As humanity builds within its ever-expanding confines, so does the tension between its environment and its accrued memories and rituals. The artists’ negotiations with fire, water, and the atmospheric are imbued with this tenuousness.

The liminal space where land and water meet is the site in which Grewal stakes his claim in this new series of work. Allegory and objectivity commingle to produce the artist’s contemplative style, wherein figures and landscape concurrently build space. With translucent application and airiness of palette, dense rock formations and groups of persons seemingly emerge, caught in their traversals. These figures’ explorations are ambiguous and without intention; they cross Grewal’s terrain of light, water, and rock in the same way as the viewer’s scanning, with unhurried and deliberate surveying.

Recalling the virtuosic surfaces of Old Masters’ etchings as much as the primal markings of prehistoric caves, Cole Lu’s burnt panels encapsulate an impossible span of time and the foundation of humanity. Within a grand, overarching purview of civilization lies a personal and mythological storytelling that registers between the individual recollection and a cross-historical collective. For the exhibition, Lu presents artworks which call to mind architectural elements from an absented site, a fireplace and a pair of clerestory windows, conjuring the memories of a non-place yet leaving them open as potential portals.

Seen from their side, Barbana Bojadzi’s multi-media panels evidence, in their pastel blue and bubble gum pink, the character of their making. The support, nested beneath swaths of textural colors, produced from a variety of varnishes and paints, are heavy-duty construction panels. Through the reclamation of these humble materials, Bojadzi suggests history’s stratification, layered and built. These highly produced and synthesized surfaces also recall blustering plein-air scenes, like a Turner produced from the industrial materials of its time.