Ahrens Catalog

Alena Ahrens The Satori Paintings

WilliamShearburnGallery 665 S Skinker Blvd St. Louis, MO 63105 314.367.8020 www.shearburngallery.com

Satori XI, 2025 Acrylic on raw canvas 48 x 48 in.

Rooted in the aesthetics of stillness and perception, the Satori paintings offer meditative fields of color that evoke the subtle, often ineffable moments of clarity that arise in pause. “Satori,” a term drawn from Zen Buddhism, refers to sudden awakening not as spectacle, but as a quiet shift in awareness. Soft gradients infused with hues drawn from the textures, rituals, and landscapes of Asian cultures merge with atmospheric layers and subtle tonal shifts, inviting the viewer to slow down and encounter presence as both fleeting and expansive. Each painting is composed using multiple thin layers of acrylic on raw canvas, allowing the material’s natural texture and absorption to guide the pigment’s movement emphasizing process, imperfection, and the sensation of passage. The work resists overt narrative, offering instead a spacious visual terrain where emotion and meaning emerge subtly through the experience of looking.

Satori XIII, 2025 Acrylic on raw canvas 48 x 48 in.

Satori XVI, 2025 Acrylic on raw canvas 36 x 36 in.

Satori XXIX, 2025 Acrylic on canvas 36 x 36 in.

Satori XXX, 2025 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 in.

Satori XXXIII, 2025 Acrylic on canvas 54 x 54 in.

My heritage is influenced by spirit keepers; the bricklayers, fisherfolk, Baptist deacons, Buddhist monks, graffiti walls, planters, and transcendental mantras. I come from the American Midwest and Southeast Asia, places with distinct and contrasting views of the self. The convergence of these two worlds, each with its own traditions, values, and perspectives, inspire me to explore themes of cultural hybridity.

-ALENA AHRENS

Satori XXXI, 2025 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 60 in.

Satori XXXIV, 2025 Acrylic on canvas 46 x 46 in.

Satori XXXII, 2025 Acrylic on canvas 56 x 56 in.

Alena Ahrens is a contemporary Asian American artist whose practice explores Color Field painting through the intersections of her bicultural identity. Her work engages this history through nuanced chromatic languages and material choices informed by her cross-cultural Asian upbringing. Her works engage historical sources of color from mineral and botanical pigments to natural dyeing processes while drawing on ritualistic aspects of preparation, transformation, and time.

Through these methods, Ahrens reframes Color Field as more than a retinal experience: it becomes a site where pigment, memory, and philosophy converge. The layering of acrylic gradients, natural dyes, and performative gestures opens a field that is both contemplative and embodied, inviting viewers to engage with the liminality of presence and absence, surface and depth, tradition and reinvention.

Ahrens has exhibited in solo and group shows at the Zhou B. Art Center (Chicago, IL), Tipi Project (Brooklyn, NY), MoMA PS1 (New York, NY), DAMU Theatre (Prague, CZ), and ARTROOM (Lisbon, PT). She has participated in international residencies at Residency Unlimited (New York), Château Orquevaux (France), and Hangar Arts (Lisbon). In 2025 a selection of her Satori paintings were acquired by the J.P. Morgan Chase Art Collection.

WilliamShearburnGallery 665 S Skinker Blvd St. Louis, MO 63105 314.367.8020 www.shearburngallery.com