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RECENT ARRIVALS: EMMI WHITEHORSE |
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"In celebration of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian's two-part retrospective Emmi Whitehorse: Intimate Landscapes, on view in Santa Fe through October 2026, LewAllen Galleries is honored to present two premier works by the Navajo (Diné) painter. Whitehorse's paintings, assembled from dry pigment, oil, pastel, and graphite on paper mounted on canvas, are richly layered, each mark set within fields of deep violet, storm blue, and dusted earth. Drawn from the landscapes and cosmologies of the Navajo Nation, the works register a generational intimacy with place and an abiding attentiveness to the sacred within it. Subtle allusions abound to the movement of mesa shadows, the chromatic shifts of first light on dry soil, the forms of seed pods, pollen grains, and animal tracks impressed into frost. Across her surfaces, Whitehorse develops an indigenous lexicon of signs, encompassing curving tendrils, biomorphic notations, and calligraphic traces,. This visual language that situates permanence and mutability in continuous relation, rooting the poetics of change within the interplay of natural and cultural idioms.
Her paintings reclaim the formal ambitions of postwar abstraction, the tensile lyricism of Twombly’s line, the atmospheric chromatic fields of Rothko, and return them to an inherited knowledge of land shaped through Diné oral tradition and sustained painterly attention. Whitehorse has described her practice as “the story of knowing land over time” and of “being completely, microcosmically within a place.” Within these compositions, the Diné concept of Hózhó, a state of balance among nature, humanity, and the cosmos, finds expression through a meditative visual language of layered color and finely calibrated line. Her grandmother, a master weaver, instructed her never to approach the work in a state of imbalance; the paintings honor this ethic, unfolding as contemplative fields fusing the ancient dignity of petroglyphic compositions with a sinuous, calligraphic precision.
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LewAllen Galleries is pleased to present two exemplary works: |
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EMMI WHITEHORSE: ICE PLANT |
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Emmi Whitehorse, Ice Plant, 1999, Oil & chalk on paper on canvas, 39.5 x 51.25 in
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In Ice Plant, Whitehorse first builds a luminous ground by applying oil paint washes to the flat paper surface. Vast, vaporous expanses of earthy ochre and blush glow above slates, cool pewters, and deep blues, establish the work's tranquil, atmospheric foundation. |
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EMMI WHITEHORSE: BLUE FIELD II |
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Emmi Whitehorse, Blue Field II, 1995, Oil & chalk on paper on canvas, 40.5 28.5 in
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In Blue Field II, dusty amethyst and deep plum create a lyrical interplay and atmosphere of depth, utilizing a reductive palette to emphasize a rhythmic calligraphic nature of her hand. |
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