Transition is always a relief. Destination means death to me. If I could figure out a way to remain forever in transition, in the disconnected and unfamiliar, I could remain in a state of perpetual freedom.
– David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
Contributed by Zach Seeger / Figuration, transformation, and materiality are on display at Turn Gallery in the group show “We Are Parts.” The work of Lily Rose Fine, Olivia Springberg, C Lucy Whitehead, and Caroline Zurmely nods gracefully to fragmentary bodies and mementos of the deceptively carefree 1990s aesthetic, vaulting dated, picayune fashion into collective memory and saving it from dissolution into the vast sea of pedestrian art.
Olivia Springberg’s paintings are both cinematic and dreamlike, mirroring Man Ray’s reverse-negative films and Alexi Worth’s cutout figuration. While Man Ray sought alternatives to the traditional arts in a mechanical age, Springberg’s paintings utilize the intimate surface and craft of painting to produce concrete, handmade artifacts that depict something shifting and ephemeral, capturing it as observable visual phenomena.
C Lucy Whitehead’s paintings are gentle meditations on bodily form. With Sarah Lucas’ recent resurgence, it would be easy to cast Whitehead’s paintings as pictorial depictions of rehashed, floppy, abstracted Your Bizarre Adventure bodies of old. But gauzy light bathes the velvety surfaces and fuzzy edges, affording the work an uncannily seductive quality. Beautiful and curious, they summon the kind of chance encounter shown in a Trisha Donnelly piece rather than, say, a staged meeting à la Hans Bellmer.
Caroline Zurmely’s paintings, composed with makeup, have the force of a Gen X mom balancing work with free-range parental zeal. At first glance, the works read like pixelated closeups of a personal scrapbook but on further inspection acquire a painterly materiality as they seem to float out from the wall. The paint itself transforms the image from casual clipping to commemorative object. These works would be at home in a 16-bit world as unique physical states that require the painted rectangle to be activated and archived.
Lily Rose Fine renders distinctly feminine symbolic narratives that are at once personal and universal. Three pieces construable as a triptych or single related pieces portray stages of butterfly metamorphosis, clear in their metaphorical relationship to human life but generated with such exceptional care and consideration as to refute any accusation of “painting China.” Here, too, the materiality of the paint expresses the allure of beautiful things. It also frames the human desire to categorize the living world without negating or minimizing its sublimeness. Fine’s sculpture underlines the point, recalling Kiki Smith’s fluidity between mediums. With all due respect to Barnett Newman, maybe ornithology does interest the birds.
“We Are Parts”, 2026, installation view
“We Are Parts,” Turn Gallery, 32 East 68th Street, New York, NY. Through April 25, 2026.
About the author: Zach Seeger is a painter working in LIC and upstate New York.
