Glistening Water
Artist: Alena Ahrens
Curated by Zhiheng Ashely Zhang
Curatorial Assistant: Samantha Esmé Williams, Luman Jiang
Time: Nov.7 - Dec.7, 2025
Opening Reception: Nov.7, 6-9pm
Location: Sojourner Gallery, 178 Bleecker St, 2nd Floor, New York, NY 10012
In Glistening Water, artist Alena Ahrens invites viewers into a contemplative encounter with color, perception, and the quiet movement of time. Her paintings unfold like slow breaths—each layer of pigment, gradient, and gesture forming a rhythm that is less seen than felt. Drawing from both Color Field painting and the ritualistic processes of material transformation, Ahrens turns color into a vessel of reflection, a surface where memory and awareness meet.
The exhibition brings together two series, The Arc Paintings and Satori Paintings, that explore balance and awakening through minimal form and luminous tone. Curved lines and atmospheric fields suggest the passage between presence and absence, structure and dissolution. In the Satori Paintings, each work 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. These subtle gradations create meditative fields that evoke moments of stillness and clarity—fleeting awakenings that arise in pause.
Like water catching light for an instant before returning to stillness, Ahrens’ works evoke the quiet revelations that occur when perception shifts inward. In those moments, what we see merges with what we feel; the external view touches something within. Through this gentle dialogue between form and emptiness, Glistening Water becomes a meditation on how beauty reveals itself—not in spectacle, but in awareness.
About the artist:
Alena Ahrens is a contemporary Asian American artist whose practice explores Color Field painting through the intersections of her bicultural identity. Drawing on her upbringing between the American Midwest and Southeast Asia, she investigates how color, ritual, and perception intersect as forms of embodied awareness. Her work engages historical and natural sources of pigment—from botanical dyes to acrylic gradients—transforming them through meditative processes of layering and erasure.
Ahrens describes her work as an inquiry into how awareness unfolds—slowly, rhythmically, like breath or light shifting across water. She approaches color as both form and philosophy, a language that reveals the threshold between what is seen and what is felt. Growing up between two visual and spiritual traditions, she continually negotiates the dualities between material and metaphysical, clarity and opacity. These sensibilities inform her process, which draws upon Buddhist ritual, natural dyeing, and Color Field abstraction, translating them into chromatic fields that suspend stillness and movement within the same gesture.
In her Satori and Arc series, Ahrens seeks to reconcile presence and impermanence. Thin layers of pigment, gradients, and suspended lines become meditations on perception—where form dissolves and reappears in luminous flux. Like reflections on water, her paintings suggest moments of awakening that arrive quietly through observation. For Ahrens, painting is not an act of representation but of becoming: a durational process of layering, erasure, and attention—an act of listening to the material until meaning surfaces.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at MoMA PS1 (New York), Zhou B. Art Center (Chicago), DAMU Theatre (Prague), and ARTROOM (Lisbon). She has been an artist-in-residence at Residency Unlimited (New York), Château Orquevaux (France), and Hangar Arts (Lisbon). In 2025, her Satori paintings were acquired by the J.P. Morgan Chase Art Collection.
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For further inquiries, please contact ash@sojournergallery.com
