Tessa Greene O’Brien
Tessa Greene O’Brien
Poems from Here
April 23 – May 23, 2026
CANDICE MADEY
1 Rivington Street, New York
April 23 – June 12, 2026
ALEXANDRE
25 East 73rd Street, New York
ALEXANDRE and CANDICE MADEY present Tessa Greene O’Brien: Poems From Here, the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York, on view at ALEXANDRE from April 23 through June 12, and at CANDICE MADEY from April 23 through May 23. Featuring a new body of paintings begun in 2025 and completed this year, this exhibition displays a deepened engagement with the landscape and ecology of O’Brien’s surroundings in Maine, while reintroducing the human figure into sites shaped by memory and history.
At the heart of O’Brien’s (b. 1982, Maine) practice is an expansive understanding of painting itself: she approaches the medium as an open field, where the only real limitations arise through self-imposed boundaries. Drawing inspiration from the Supports/Surfaces movement of the late 1960s and early 70s, color field painting, and folk modernism, O’Brien paints compositions that are at once atmospheric and grounded, where mood and structure hold equal weight. She paints what she sees and knows: the people, places, and environments to which she is intimately connected. This closeness grants the work an elasticity that enables her to move fluidly between attentive observation and experimental interpretation, where faithful renderings of light, topography, and detail coexist with looser gestures that register atmosphere, mood, and the emotional temperature of a moment.
The works in Poems From Here emerge from O’Brien’s understanding of life as deeply interconnected and interdependent. As she began this series, events close to home and across the country required attention and care, making physical presence newly urgent. The appearance of the human figure within these landscapes reflects that lived awareness: bodies return not as symbols, but as participants in the same systems that shape land and memory. These figures are seamlessly integrated into her compositions, where the landscape is never treated as backdrop. In a number of works, a plant or tree occupies the central position typically reserved for a human subject, granting equal significance to vegetal and human forms and reinforcing the shared ecology they inhabit. O’Brien renders terrains shaped by geologic forces, ecological systems, and human intervention—landscapes where clearings recur as charged sites of action, wildfire smoke stains sunsets orange, and distant industry turns skies violet.
Each painting begins long before oil paint touches the surface. Working with raw fabric, O’Brien dyes lengths of canvas scraps along with domestic and outdoor textiles such as table runners, life preservers, and pillowcases into layered color fields, allowing variations and irregularities to remain visible. The dyed fabric is cut and sewn in a way such that the seams become part of the composition. After stretching the surface, she alters it with bleach and layers of pigment, using wax to block and reveal areas of color so that traces of each step remain legible. The resulting works hold their own making within them: dyed, stitched, bleached, resisted, and layered, carrying both material memory and painterly intention.
Presented as a unified exhibition unfolding across two galleries, Poems From Here emphasizes continuity rather than division. The title is borrowed from an eponymous Maine Public Radio show, reflecting O’Brien’s equations of painting and poetry. Together, ALEXANDRE and CANDICE MADEY host a single body of work that explores painting as both material inquiry and intimate record—an ongoing meditation on how we inhabit the places we call home.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication with essay by Annabel Keenan.
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