Leidy Churchman

Matthew Marks is pleased to present Leidy Churchman: Space Remembers. The exhibition includes fifteen new paintings.

Churchman is known for their wide-ranging subject matter, which draws variously from nature, contemporary media, and everyday objects, as well as myriad cultural signs and symbols. Writer Alhena Katsof describes the paintings on view as “turning notions of home into a gravitational force. Here, home is cellular and celestial, broken and whole.”

In five large-scale paintings, each six feet tall and nine feet wide, Churchman takes a unique compositional approach—a sprawling landscape, an astral gateway, a hyper-magnified, closely cropped view of a shell. One work depicts Churchman’s home on an island off the coast of Maine, the pastoral setting permeated with unexpected dwellers. A cow rests in the foreground with a blueberry bush seemingly sprouting from its midsection, alongside two lobsters nearby. The icon of a Buddhist deity of protection floats overhead.

In another painting, a central void emerges from the depths of a storm drain among dark, ambient clouds entangled with branches, vines, snakes, fish, and birds to reveal the swirling interior chambers of a nautilus shell. A mirror image hangs across the gallery, in which a portal-like, abstracted lotus flower seems to part the surrounding sky.

Churchman describes their paintings as an ongoing investigation into the nature of consciousness and our ability to perceive it—a quest to expand what is knowable. In Center of the Universe (Ratna) (2026), the artist juxtaposes an idyllic mountain range with an expanse that is host to death and decay. A rendering of Churchman's own body, in pieces and disintegrating, is at the center of the scene, a reference to the Tibetan Buddhist ritual of chöd. “A practitioner of chöd visualizes offering their body parts for the benefit of all,” Churchman explains. “This includes non-human entities, symbolized in the painting by the bullfrog, coyote, brown bear, and rock.”

Leidy Churchman (b. 1979) lives and works in New York and Maine. Churchman’s work has been included in group exhibitions at museums including MoMA PS1 in New York, Fondazione Prada in Venice, Museum Brandhorst in Munich, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the 2022 Whitney Biennial. One-person exhibitions include the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne, the Boston University Art Gallery, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Hessel Museum at CCS Bard in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.