MAGGIE MICHAEL

"Painting untethers a mesh of past, present and future. Intuitive and intentional, the emotion of making is moving towards the stillness of viewing, wavering in the density and airiness of our coming and going. Abstraction, a siren for expansive thinking, offers generous clarity and strangeness; also, brutal, base forms of beauty."

– Maggie Michael

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Maggie Michael: Root Chords, Earth to Sky, the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery and on the West Coast. The exhibition will be presented in Gallery 1, preview begins January 7 and the exhibition runs from January 11 through February 22, 2025. The artist reception will be held February 1, 4 pm - 7 pm.

Maggie Michael’s paintings can be ferocious and muscular. They can also be seductive and dreamlike. Considered one of Washington, D.C.’s leading painters, Michael's lyrical works are a powerful reminder of the transformative potential of abstraction. Her paintings unfold as a series of capricious moments, processes, and forms, evoking the history and energy of American abstract expressionism. Her paintings grapple with humanity and nature's profound duality—our capacity to both sustain and destroy—yet, she also prioritizes painterly strategy, using form as a vehicle to convey material content. Michael’s works flow like sequences, a confluence of the visual vocabulary she has developed over her 25-year career. 

Michael's paintings juxtapose expressive, gestural brushwork, with precise shapes and incorporate a diverse range of media including ink, latex, acrylic, oil, and spray paint in a jarring yet harmonious blend of colors. Found objects such as pine needles, feathers, soil, rocks, shells, insects, leaves, and branches also make frequent appearances on her canvases as she wields an arsenal of abstract techniques to craft richly textured works that stir visceral responses.

At the heart of Michael's experiential and experimental project lies an instinctive desire to perceive fresh perspectives, to generate novel, more expansive and illuminating impressions of the world. With each application of paint or rotation of the canvas, she reaches for ways to understand natural, elemental, and spiritual worlds—sky, trees, mountains, clouds, wind, water, sunlight, bodies (plant, animal, human), minerals, energy, motion—reveal insights and realizations about existence and the human condition. Yet her works also inhabit other realms, “sourced,’ as she says, ‘from wells of feeling, seas of teaching, thoughts turning over and under, poetic rememberings, and musings on earth folding and unfolding.”