NEW YORK, NY.- Alexander Berggruen presents Madeline Peckenpaugh: Chosen Places. This exhibition will open Wednesday, May 21, 2025.

Madeline Peckenpaugh’s paintings invite and destabilize a viewer’s culturally trained perception of the landscape to explore nature, memory, and the self. There is a reconciliation of opposites: the deep space of the real world and the flat space of the canvas. She shifts the scale of everyday elements, interlaces forms, and renders them in single tones and fluctuating textures. Through iterations of adding, blurring, and scraping paint to veil and expose prior layers, Peckenpaugh creates scenes that oscillate between landscape and abstraction, challenging a viewer’s sense of reality. She creates environments where human gesture and the spontaneity of the material come together. In her new body of work in Chosen Places, her gestures have become looser. This ambiguity lends mystery to the implied landscape as she probes the perceptual slips between corporeal experience, memory, and imagination.

Peckenpaugh lures a viewer in with the semblance of the natural world. She makes her paintings with techniques similar to Gerhard Richter, resulting in comparable interlocking horizontal, diagonal, and/or vertical lines. In her painting Held for instance, horizontal and diagonal forms dominate the composition. Her painting Spring prominently features textured bands of colors in horizontal rows that are interrupted by wavy vertical lines. These undulating lines energize the canvas with motion and imbue the painting with a sense of infinite space, perhaps of a body of water or a lush landscape. Unlike Richter’s approach to layering and removing paint, Peckenpaugh’s gestures are more distinct and resemble organic elements such as reeds, leaves, flowers, trees, and water. In some cases, she uses cutout painted papers to determine where to place hard-edged objects before she paints them. When placed, they create rhythm and generate spontaneity, finding order within disorder. Her refined palettes and forms allow a viewer to almost feel the atmosphere in her paintings—cold and windy in In Orbit, humid and muggy in Held, wet and floral in Betrothal, fresh and rainy in Spring.

The implied depth of Peckenpaugh’s paintings draws a viewer in with ease, but the surface then mischievously pushes them back to the flat reality of the painted canvas. Here, one is faced with her hard edged shapes, thick lines of gesso, and other traces of how the painting was made. In one of her largest paintings to date, In Orbit, a horizontal band on the lower register of the canvas acts as a compositional barrier, reminding a viewer that this is a painting. In Orbit features both an internal light and an implied external light source. While elements within the image are illuminated, there are also light spots seemingly from other sources. Some of the light flares may be perceived like sunlight flaring in a photograph, while others are softer and may emulate dappled light falling onto the canvas itself from outside of the painting. The painting thus resembles an image documented many times, as if the painting itself depicts a photograph of a painting of a photograph, even though In Orbit depicts an entirely imagined scene. Peckenpaugh, an artist whose photography has long been intertwined with her painting, furthers this interplay between painting and photography, underscoring its omnipresence in our contemporary culture.

Mysterious abstract qualities of Peckenpaugh’s paintings seem to illuminate a spiritual dimension. In addition to orbs of light, other darker floating forms may resemble a range of objects from rocks, flowers, and fruits to planets or beings. These orbs and forms often appear in the foreground, seeming to rise and come together into an intimate cluster. The undulating textures, interlacing forms, and restless light cause the landscape to appear to move with the eye, as if animated by internal life forces. A spiritual dimension comes in and out of focus, in sharp relief and nebulous veiled forms.

These nebulous forms–flowers that appear to fade away or ambiguous areas where paint has been wiped away–may symbolize aspects of life that one has outgrown. The varying degrees of detail depicted in Peckenpaugh’s paintings represent an accumulation of decisions: what deserves the artist’s full attention and what can be allowed to wane. The places we inhabit and the relationships we foster–or let fade–are among the many daily decisions that reflect our values in this transient life. The exhibition’s title Chosen Places may refer to the intentional ways one begins to spend their time upon recognizing its continual passing.

Peckenpaugh’s practice oscillates between destruction and creation: adding paint, wiping it away, and adding more on top. This ultimately is an act of creation that generates expansiveness and a politics of abundance where there is more than enough to go around. Here, wild spaces thrive, and infinitely receding landscapes are fertile with potential and growth. Continuing to evolve, Peckenpaugh fosters the creation of what she wants to see—wilderness, mischief, painting that is aware of itself, beauty—as the grass is greener where it’s watered. Titled Chosen Places, the scenes depicted in this exhibition are implied to be special because someone, perhaps the artist, has cultivated them to be so, taking elements from her past experiences to create new sensations of landscapes that slip into abstraction, or abstractions that slip into landscapes.

by Kirsten Cave.