Gabrielle Garland 2025

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GABRIELLE GARLAND

GABRIELLE GARLAND

“Houses are really bodies,” wrote the British-born, naturalized Mexican artist and author Leonora Carrington in her 1974 novel The Hearing Trumpet. “We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh, and bloodstream.” In both her paintings and her prose, the surrealist built and dissolved worlds, often collapsing the boundaries between humans and the inanimate objects and architecture that surround them. In works like The House Opposite (1945), painted shortly after Carrington discovered she was pregnant, the built structure assumes the qualities of a portrait capable of holding the artist’s multifaceted identity and multivalent emotions.

Similarly, the New York-based artist Gabrielle Garland imbues her technicolor paintings of houses with the personalities of the inhabitants she imagines sitting down to dinner, taking a nap, or reading a book inside the insulated walls and curtained windowpanes. While Garland’s compositions are grounded in phenomenological observation, rather than in dreams or fantasies, they possess a vitality and animacy reminiscent of her surrealist predecessors. Like Carrington, her houses also act as reflections and extensions of their perceived owners’ psyches. The architectural facades often take on the characteristics of human faces—the windows appear as eyes, twin lanterns as nostrils, and the door as a yawning mouth—compounding their metonymical function.

“It’s through our homes and how we make a house our own that we express ourselves,” Garland says. “It’s where everyone’s artistry and creativity come out, whether they think about themselves as artists and creatives or not.”

Garland, who was raised by two painters in New York City, grew up surrounded by art and architecture. Her parents met in art school and were living in the Chelsea Hotel when she was born. They

later moved to an East Village apartment where the artist still resides. Her father was an abstract expressionist, and her mother owned a decorative painting firm that specialized in the restoration of historical buildings. While it’s easy to see the enduring influence of her father’s lush, luminous color palette, it was lying on her back and painting the ceilings of landmark buildings alongside her mother that refined Garland’s eye for architectural details and her understanding of how we perceive built environments.

Though some of Garland’s subjects are inspired by images found in magazines or on social media, the majority are based on her own photographs of houses taken during her trips to cities and towns across the country—from Los Angeles to New Port Richey. Back in the studio, her process begins with selecting a home from her archives. Referencing a plethora of photos taken from various angles, she composes a single image shaped by both her documentation and recollection of the visit. The resulting illustrations and paintings convey the depth and dimensionality of space, rather than the single-point perspective captured by a camera.

In her work, the overlapping terracotta roof tiles, the shadows across the molded architrave, the neighbor’s teal blue gutters, and the chain-link fence in front of the garage are combined into a single frame, a possibility only achievable in the imagination. She employs distortion to shrink certain

Leonora Carrington, And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, 1953, Oil on canvas, 23 5/8 x 27 9/16 inches (60 x 70 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, Gift of Joan H. Tisch.

elements while exaggerating others, mirroring how they might appear in memory. For instance, an intricate wrought-iron door or a mailbox painted with dolphins leaping before a rising moon may loom larger than life in one’s recollection. The puppy waiting in the front yard at the end of each day may tower over the dormer, while the unadorned front door may shrink to the proportions of a coin slot between the two grand picture windows. As Marcel Proust once wrote, “Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.” Garland’s resulting portraits are vivid and energetic: the familiar scenes, twisted and thrown off-kilter, are surprising and enthralling.

Elsewhere, Garland employs vivid colors to draw attention to the minor adjustments that people make to transform houses into homes. Emerald green shutters, teal and peach polka-dot-patterned curtains, a brilliant Pompeii-red-paneled garage, and a fuchsia flamingo poised beside the front steps are but a few of the finely detailed elements that comprise her vernacular of domestic realism. These alterations—along with observable signs of life, such as a ring of condensation left from warm breath on cold glass, an illuminated kitchen on the other side of the pane, freshly potted geraniums in a window box, a commercial jet soaring over the eaves of a shingled roof—inform Garland’s imaginary portrait of the people who reside inside.

Although human figures are absent from her compositions, their presence is palpable. These houses aren’t abandoned; they don’t exist in a post-human apocalypse. Instead, they are the products of people’s labor, care, and creativity. That each house, despite the repetition of architectural elements and the use of familiar mass-produced materials, is distinctive is a testament to both the ingenuity of their owners and the quality of the artist’s attention: her ability to discern the most illustrative details. It’s true that no two inhabited houses are exactly alike. As Dorothy said in The Wizard of Oz, “There’s no place like home.”

“Making a home is one of the most essential parts of our lives and has been for humans for all time,” Garland says. “It’s what most people work their whole lives for and are always aspiring toward.” Her decision to title her paintings with movie quotes is another gesture toward what, or more accurately who, is absent from the frame and an invitation for the viewer to similarly partake in her act of invention: conjuring the character who might at any moment step out the door and head off to work.

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Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.—Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) (2025) titles a gabled home, tinged with the lilac of twilight, featuring a quaint front porch and windows aglow with the last golden cast of the sinking sun. On one side of the walkway, there is an undulating stop sign, with its red paint worn silver in parts by weather and age; on the other is a street sign on a wooden pole that extends beyond the frame. The sherbet orange-peachpink sky suffuses the scene with a sense of warmth and benevolence that makes it easy to conjure a sense of faith in strangers and neighbors alike.

Elsewhere, in And ... and ... c’mon, Nick, what do you expect? To live happily ever after?—Elizabeth James, The Parent Trap (1998) (2025), the dwindling sunlight soaks the house in an ominous shade of scarlet. One side of the structure appears to buckle, succumbing to the weight of the neighboring house. On the other side, a stealth bomber careens through the air, leaving a blurry jet stream ghosting in its wake. The darkened windows are shut against the snow masking the lawn, the shrubbery, and the bone-bare trees. All is not as it seems; the mounting pressure of the expectation of domestic bliss seems to threaten the basic tenets of reality.

Garland’s masterful modulation of light and shadow gives the acrylic and graphite portraits a psychological complexity and emotional valence. Crisp, defined shadows cut across luminous compositions, while pools of yellow light emitted from outdoor lanterns illuminate colors that are otherwise concealed by inky, indigo washes of night. The chiaroscuro-esque intensity recalls Emily Dickinson’s observation that there’s a “certain Slant of light” that “oppresses like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes.” The olive-black shadows stretching from serpentine branches and looming structures, just out of frame, appear dense and definitive, as in The guy’s possessed tonight.—Laura, Talk Radio (1988) (2025). While the mottled light filtering through lacy foliage and Breeze Block walls appears to flicker and shimmer before your eyes, as in Remember, you’re the one who can fill the world with sunshine.—Snow White, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) (2024). Though the former lends the work an oneiric, surrealist quality and the latter a sense of wistfulness and nostalgia, they both recall a time when natural phenomena were rife with enchantment and mystery. This exacting attention to the behavior of light—its quality, opacity, and color—ensures an uncanny verisimilitude across the exhibition.

Garland also employs painterly texture to reflect reality or challenge our assumptions about the polished picture plane. Itchy sgraffiti captures the grit of an asphalt shingle rooftop and the scratch of parched, unkempt lawns, while brushy strokes replicate whitewashed exteriors or, in a swirling gesture, animate a wispy, cloud-filled sky. Light impasto mimics the swells and shallows of a sandy front yard or the quasi-bas relief of ornamental molding. In paintings like That is why every day we pray for rain.—Daena, Planet of the Apes (2001) (2024), Garland incorporates fine glitter to capture the gleam of desert sunlight on cacti, or in the case of What would Mother think of my becoming a pirate?—Wendy Darling, Peter Pan (2003) (2024), the crystalline quality of ice.

By capturing moments specific to a particular hour of the day, month, season, and atmosphere, along with its attendant physical, spiritual, and cultural implications, the artist creates a sense of sequence and continuity. The enduring past and latent future are suggested through each scene’s specificity. Here, as in life, all of time-eternal is unfolding synchronously. As Édouard Manet observed: “Everything is mere appearance, the pleasures of a passing hour, a midsummer night’s dream. Only painting, the reflection of a reflection—but the reflection, too, of eternity—can record some of the glitter of this mirage.”

Tara Anne Dalbow is a writer and critic living in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Interview, Bomb, Los Angeles Review of Books, ARTnews, Frieze, Art Basel, Dwell, Artsy, W Magazine, and elsewhere.

And... and... c’mon, Nick, what do you expect? To live happily ever after?

—Elizabeth James, The Parent Trap (1998), 2024

48 x 48 inches

122 x 122 cm

Acrylic, oil, and glitter on canvas

Good morning, winner. Take a deep breath. Good. You’re ready to dominate this day.

—Motivational Voice, Booksmart (2019), 2024

48 x 48 inches

122 x 122 cm

Acrylic and oil on canvas

I don’t bite, you know... unless it’s called for. —Regina Lampert, Charade (1963), 2024

48 x 48 inches

122 x 122 cm

Acrylic on canvas

I’m glad he’s single because I’m going to climb that like a tree. —Megan, Bridesmaids (2011), 2024

48 x 48 inches

122 x 122 cm

Acrylic on canvas

It’s just, living alone, you know? And, the thought of buying those books like Cooking For One, and... it’s just too depressing. —Allison Jones, Single White Female (1992), 2024

48 x 48 inches

122 x 122 cm

Acrylic on canvas

That is why every day we pray for rain. —Daena, Planet of the Apes (2001), 2024

36 x 36 inches

91 x 91 cm

Acrylic and glitter on canvas

We have enough. You can stop now. —Ava Fontaine, Lord of War (2005), 2024

and oil on canvas

48 x 48 inches

122 x 122 cm

Acrylic, molding paste, glitter

What would Mother think of my becoming a pirate? —Wendy Darling, Peter Pan (2003), 2024

48 x 48 inches

122 x 122 cm

Acrylic and glitter on canvas

You don’t find that offensive? You don’t find that sexist? —Bobbi Flekman, This is Spinal Tap (1984), 2024

and glitter on canvas

48 x 48 inches

122 x 122 cm

Acrylic

I guess it feels different when it’s someone you love —Cassandra, Promising Young Woman (2020), 2025

36 x 36 inches

91 x 91 cm

Acrylic on canvas

It would seem that you have no explanation for what you have done. You have shed the blood of so many Christian souls, and yet... before me now, all I see is a... young and vain and foolish man so easily riled, so easily beguiled. —Catherine, The King (2019), 2025

36 x 36 inches

91 x 91 cm

Acrylic on canvas

The little bird thought she was going to die out there in the forest. All alone. She called out, in her sweet baby voice, to see if her ma would hear her. Her voice was so pure, it carried for miles through the trees. And suddenly, out of nowhere, her ma came flying down and scooped her up in her breast. And the little baby bird chirped with delight, She held on tight to the trees till they came to a beautiful place. Where she and her ma and pa could live happily together. The sun shone brightly, the air was clear, and she was home. —Clare, The Nightingale (2018), 2025

36 x 36 inches

91 x 91 cm

Acrylic on canvas

Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. —Blanche DuBois, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), 2025

oil, and glitter on canvas

48 x 48 inches

122 x 122 cm

Acrylic,

Why are you hiding back there? You don’t have to hide from me. I’m Peg Boggs, your local Avon representative, and I’m as harmless as cherry pie. —Peg, Edward Scissorhands (1990), 2025

Acrylic on canvas

36 x 36 inches

91 x 91 cm

Published on the occasion of the exhibition

GABRIELLE GARLAND

I’ll GET YOU, MY PRETTY, AND YOUR LITTLE DOG TOO

4 September – 25 October 2025

Miles McEnery Gallery 511 West 22nd Street New York NY 10011

tel +1 212 445 0051 www.milesmcenery.com

Publication © 2025 Miles McEnery Gallery

All rights reserved

Essay © 2025 Tara Anne Dalbow

Photo Credit

p. 4: © 2025 Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

Associate Director

Julia Schlank, New York, NY

Photography by Dan Bradica, New York, NY

Catalogue layout by Allison Leung

ISBN: 979-8-3507-5188-8

Cover: I don’t bite, you know... unless it’s called for. —Regina Lampert, Charade (1963), (detail), 2025

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