Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Emmi Whitehorse: Abloom, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of Emmi Whitehorse. Opening Friday, September 6, 2024, the presentation will feature four new works, all painted this year. On view through October 19, 2024, the exhibition coincides with both the Venice Biennale’s Stranieri Ovunque - Foreigners Everywhere, which includes four of the artist’s paintings, as well as the Armory Show, where the gallery will display additional work by Emmi Whitehorse. A publication will also accompany the exhibition, featuring an interview between Whitehorse and fellow artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

“My paintings tell the story of knowing land over time—of being completely, microcosmically within a place,” says Whitehorse of her enigmatic compositions. The works often draw on the Southwestern landscape as a source of inspiration. Plantlike forms float beside elemental shapes like spirals, gentle curves, and gestural marks. In Whitehorse’s recent works like Abloom (2024), the vaporous substrates shift across multiple hues, from deep violet and stormy gray, to warm ochres and reds. At times, the diffuse and shifting substrates populated with diverse organic forms appear like droplets of seawater, teeming with microscopic life. At other times, the gradual fluctuations in light seem to drift across the canvas like the cloud-cast shadows across a landscape. Deliberately meditative and slow, these paintings register fleeting sensory perceptions and subtle shifts in light, space, and color—the central axes around which the artist’s work has evolved.

Throughout her career, Whitehorse’s longstanding commitment to beauty and peace has its origins in the Navajo philosophy Hózhó, which seeks to achieve a harmonious balance of life, mind, and body with nature. The meditative and tranquil qualities in her work are anything but incidental: Whitehorse avoids painting when in turbulent moods, lest they transfer to her paintings. The expansive diptych included in the exhibition, Chaco (2024), measures over 10 feet across. The canvas is packed with organic forms suspended in an infinite ether. The dense, dynamic thicket of life, however, is serene. As in nature, the many linear shapes observe a gentle vertical orientation, giving the composition an impression of loose, organic order.

Born 1957 in Crownpoint, New Mexico, Emmi Whitehorse is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation. Whitehorse received a BA with a Major in Painting from the University of New Mexico in 1980, and an MA with a Major in Printmaking and a Minor in Art History in 1982, also from her alma mater. Whitehorse’s work has been the subject of dozens of museum and gallery presentations since 1979. Her solo exhibitions have been held at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado (2006); Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska (2001); Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona (1997); and The Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico (1991). She has participated in group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including La Biennale di Venezia: Stranieri Ovunque - Strangers Everywhere (2024), The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2023–2024); Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019–2022); Celebrating Diversities in Art, Springfield Art Museum, Massachusetts (2012); Modern Times - Kunst der Indianischen Moderne und Postmoderne, Galerieverein Leonberg, Germany (2011); Into the Void: Abstract Art, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, California (2010); Unlimited Boundaries: Dichotomy of Place in Contemporary Native American Art, Albuquerque Museum of Art, New Mexico (2007); Off The Map, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, New York, New York (2007); and Contemporary Art in New Mexico, SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (1996).

Her work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Detroit Institute for the Arts, Detroit, Michigan; Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, Indiana; Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona; Westfalisches Museum, Münster, Germany; The Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, among many others.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Emmi Whitehorse.

Emmi Whitehorse: Abloom will be on view at Garth Greenan Gallery, 545 West 20th Street (between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues), through Saturday, October 19th, 2024. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. For more information, please contact the gallery at (212) 929-1351, or email info@garthgreenan. com.