Lucy Tarquinio

Entrance presents Winter Painting, a new exhibition by painter Lucy Tarquinio, made in residency at the Entrance / Red Hook Sculpture Garden through the winter of 2025–26.

Existing in part both as a site-specific installation and a durational endurance performance, Tarquinio produced a large outdoor wall painting as the centerpoint of her exhibition. Worked through daily over the course of three months, the painting was produced on a concrete exterior wall found towards the entrance of Entrance’s sculpture garden. The artist often found herself making marks under weather conditions which allowed her only a matter of minutes in the outdoors at a time, blizzard notwithstanding. Armed with electric hand and toe warmers, Tarquinio worked in sharp, concentrated bursts: out into the cold, then back inside to recover, then out again, her body being pushed to an edge. Tarquinio describes the affective register of those sessions as approaching ‘hellscape’, a feeling that feeds directly into the work’s imagery: an art-historical undercurrent of ruin and elemental force surfaces from within the abstraction.

Unlike previous projects, which often depart from photographic source material, Winter Painting had no reference images at its origin. Driven instead by material research and physical circumstance, Tarquinio approached the concrete wall without dogmatism, experimenting freely with enamel, latex, spray paint, caulk, plasti-dip, concrete bonder, and loose pigment alongside water, snow, and foam as sculptural interjections. The surface became a site of genuine uncertainty. In part an inquiry into how these substances would adhere, bleed, resist, or bond in freezing temperatures, but also uncertain in its abstract forms and color. In earlier work, the ‘real space’ lived in the photographic image — perhaps as reference held beneath the layers of paint.

In Winter Painting, with no source other than the physical elements and real world, undeniable in its specific location and material, the tension between abstraction and image dissolves. Freed from that contention, the layers are no longer in dialogue with a source — they reference time itself: the work's making spanned specifically from the Winter Solstice to the Spring Equinox, and what accumulates across its surface is that duration.

Accompanying Winter Painting is a series of seven drawings framed in steel on view inside the Entrance / Red Hook container gallery. Titled Snow Drawings, the pieces were made in direct dialogue with falling snow, weather itself became both tool and collaborator. In total, Tarquinio’s exhibition constitutes a concentrated inquiry into painting as a physical event, what it means to make a mark when the conditions of making are pushed to an extreme.

Lucy Tarquinio, (b. 1999) is a New York-based artist, she obtained her BFA from Cooper Union in 2021. Her process-based practice obscures ideas of familiarity, oscillating between the literal and the symbolic. Tarquinio is constantly intervening in her own systems, whether with language, absurd photo material, or spatial reimaginations. All of which inspires further exploration into the realm of abstraction and truth. Believing abstraction is the answer to all visual and spatial issues, Tarquinio however lacks full commitment to it: each painting is still referencing real space within their many layers.Tarquinio's primary interest is making site specific oil paintings for experimental and difficult spaces.

Winter Painting presented by Entrance in Spring 2026 is the artist's latest endeavor. Prior shows include a solo exhibition in October 2026, Cave Paintings, held as a one-day exhibition inside the Dover Stone Church Cave, in Dover Plains, NY, where site-specific paintings correlated their canvas sizes to exact sizes of sections and nooks in the aforementioned cave. Previously her work was in the site-specific exhibition Trendkill (Basement Workshop Series), LUmkA, New York, 2024, which was published in Office Magazine in 2024. Tarquinio is a recent recipient of the 2023 Abbey Scholarship in Painting and 2022 Rolf G.Haerem Paint Award. The artist's work has been shown internationally at the Fundacion Maceta, Mexico City, Mexico; Romanian Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy; The British School, Rome, Italy.