Shifting Focus: Female Painters & Sculptors 2025: A Group Exhibition

These artists engage with conventions and anticipated outcomes, subverting, modifying, and adapting processes to create work that transcends the literal and descriptive. The exhibition showcases painting, sculpture, and digital media, with artists Yuki Aruga, Heather Horton, Sarah Muirhead, and Reisha Perlmutter interrogating their representational abilities to make transformative studies of the natural and human form. Park Jieun reveals hidden worlds within her graphic compositions, while Gretchen Andrew and Madeleine Gross explore the ironic collisions of media-generated imagery and the physicality of paint. Sculptor Cha Jongrye delves into the allusive properties of form and material.

Gretchen Andrew, an American-born artist, combines digital and AI-generated imagery to examine the intersection of algorithms and aspirational reality. She takes computer-generated oil paintings of idealized female subjects and manipulates them with additions generated by a robot program she codes herself. The result is a portrait of tension between "who you are and who the algorithms say you should be."

British artist Yuki Aruga creates large-scale oil paintings of floral motifs that unfurl in a virtuoso display of painterly skill. Her forensic depictions of natural forms are imbued with expressive intensity, transcending the everyday. Like their classical antecedents, her dramatic and sensuous compositions evoke themes of fecund growth and romantic decay.
Madeleine Gross, an American artist, makes painterly interventions on photographs. Idyllic, sun-drenched landscapes are amended with vigorously worked, painted images of interacting figures. Two worlds coexist—one of coolly observed critical distance and another of heartfelt, willful engagement. The latter, a passionate female principle, binds together these disparate images of temporal paradise and human connection.

Canadian painter Heather Horton observes her subjects through thick, stained, and undulating glass. The female head appears fragmented, occluded, and fugitive, glistening behind a veil of refractions and distortions. Identity is approached through an intervening, modulating medium that is hard to penetrate, evoking themes of perception and self-awareness.

Korean artist Park Jieun works on paper using traditional ink-laden brushwork. From a distance, her paintings appear as abstract exercises in expressive, calligraphic handling. On closer inspection, tiny urban landscapes emerge—hidden within the gestural marks, the contemporary is contained within the traditional.

Cha Jongrye, a Korean sculptor, bends and moulds birch plywood into three-dimensional Platonic forms, exploring and multiplying folds and curves. The resulting sculptures evoke a multitude of natural structures, from the contours of the earth to the cellular formations of microscopic life.

Scottish painter Sarah Muirhead creates striking depictions of the decorated human body. Her cropped, dynamic compositions reveal subjects adorned with elaborate tattoos, each embellishment adding an additional layer of meaning and narrative. Through a highly skilled and technically accomplished approach, she presents sensuous representations of the human form.

American artist Reisha Perlmutter offers ethereal painted images of women floating in water, as if suspended in an amniotic medium, caught between states of contemplation and detachment. Her precise, observation-based technique results in luminous works that suggest a spiritual dimension inhabited by her female subjects.

Curated to highlight the wide-ranging and exciting work produced by women artists associated with Pontone Gallery, Shifting Focus coincides with International Women’s Day on March 8.