NEW YORK, NY.- Miles McEnery Gallery is presenting Venus, a solo exhibition of new works by Tracy Thomason on view 20 March through 3 May 2025 at 515 West 22nd Street. Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated digital publication featuring an essay by Jessica Holmes.

Color, form, and physicality lead the way in Thomason’s new body of painted works entitled Venus. Through process based abstraction the body and landscape is explored to unearth relationships between art and planetary histories.

Thomason begins with loose, instinctive sketches, allowing somatic gestures to guide her marks into concrete forms. From these preparatory drawings, Thomason begins building the surfaces of her works, transforming traditional painterly mediums into something sculptural by mixing her oil paints with a formula of marble, calcium carbonate, and stone chips. Her compositions emerge with a fluid visual language, where sharp orthogonal lines dissect the canvas and biomorphic loops echo the body’s rhythm and movement alongside saturated color and reflective moments. When considered within the constructed terra system of their making, the abstracted marks and shapes accumulate into glyphic symbols and compositions that feel intuitive and familiar, grounding us in a shared human history.

Thomason’s paintings are not static images, but ledgers of human movement and presence—they are contemporary relics akin to the Lascaux caves, the Stonehenge monoliths, or the Nazca Lines in Peru. Thomason goes a step further, not only leaving her mark but constructing the very surfaces on which they are recorded. In doing so, she doesn’t simply document her presence; she creates a site of history where body, landscape, and memory coexist.

As Jessica Holmes writes, Thomason is “able to pluck from, and synthesize, these various reference points across time in works that deftly meet our contemporary moment. If one pictures time not as a straight line, but rather a spiral, as Thomason likes to imagine, none of these antecedents are actually anachronistic but instead logical layers embedded within her visual language.”

TRACY THOMASON (b. 1984 in Gaithersburg, MD) received her Master of Fine Arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD.

Thomason has been the subject of recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Marinaro, New York, NY; Teen Party, Brooklyn, NY; Cuevas Tilleard Projects, New York, NY; and the Interlochen School for the Arts, Interlochen, MI.

Her work has been included in recent group exhibitions at The Pit LA, Los Angeles, CA; FJORD Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; Analog Diary, Beacon, NY; MOTHER, Beacon, NY; Marinaro, New York, NY; SUNNY NY, New York, NY; Over the Influence, Los Angeles, CA; University of Tennessee Downtown Gallery, Knoxville, TN; St. Charles Projects, Baltimore, MD; Pablo’s Birthday, New York, NY; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY; and 56 Henry, New York, NY.

She is the recipient of awards and residencies, including an Exhibition Partnership and Collaboration with Dieu Donné, Brooklyn, NY; Fall Artist in Residence, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Knoxville, TN; Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY; Residency with Dana Schutz, Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL; and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Scholarship Fund, New York, NY.

Thomason lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.