Bortolami is pleased to present Violet Dennison’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, opening April 24 in the Upstairs. The exhibition brings together a suite of new paintings, marking an accretive zenith of her elastic visual vocabulary. For the past five years, Dennison has developed a recurring floral form derived from Jacob’s Ladder, deploying it across diverse scales, chroma and compositional frameworks. Rather than functioning as a stable motif, it operates as a mutable form, one that accumulates, fragments and recombines across the surface of the paintings. Dennison’s paintings serve as sites of multiple, often competing, logics, drawing from sources as wide ranging as Damascus tiles and Qing Dynasty ceramics, all the while enduring the digital pressures of cropping, stretching, and layering. At the core of her practice, painting and sculpture, is the tension between the physical quality of the artist’s hand and its tools, from brushes and squeegees, and their directive logic under a digital compass made up of masking and vectors. Refusing resolution, the work sustains these structures of art making in tension, so that they take place within, and stem from, an artificial, generative ornamental system.

Trained as a sculptor, Dennison’s transmedial approach to painting and installation is rooted in a formal language that entwines the mechanical, human, and digital. Her works—paintings and objects alike—function like screens, vibrating and pulsing beneath their surfaces. Compositions unfold through layered gestures that oscillate between control and collapse, as pigment is dragged, dissolved, or overwritten by technological processes. Embedded in these dynamics are questions about how ecological, social, and technological systems condition perception and production. Her recent works trace the shifting form of the Jacob’s Ladder, a recurring floral cipher that mutates across media, standing in for the instability of language, memory, and code.

Dennison received her BFA from New York University in 2011 and her MFA from Bard College in 2018. Her work has been exhibited internationally since 2014, with recent presentations at Kiang Malingue, New York (2025); Tara Downs, New York (2024); IIlenia, London (2024); Jan Kaps, Cologne (2023); Theta, New York (2021); Kunstverein Freiburg (2019); Kunsthalle Stavanger (2019); the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2018); and the New Museum Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New York (2018).