The In-Between Worlds of Larissa Borteh
In the artist's paintings, are we looking at plants in a state of beautiful decay, ghosts, deities, fairylands, or something from a dream?
CHICAGO — I didn’t know anything about Larissa Borteh when I first saw her paintings at Devening Projects, an artist-run gallery that has introduced me to early exhibitions by wonderful artists including Peter Shear and Sean Sullivan. Borteh’s merging of image and elongated mark reminded me of fingerpainting. Built up by thinned, viscous oil paint, Borteh’s tactile surfaces dance smoothly between still life and ethereal abstractions. Are we looking at plants in a state of beautiful decay, ghosts, deities, fairylands, or something from a dream? The world Borteh conjures up is in constant transformation, but we are never sure of the outcome. The material individuality of her works stands out at a time when many artists use paint solely as a means to an end.
There are a dozen paintings in the exhibition, ranging between 16 x 20 inches (~41 x 51 cm) and 60 x 72 inches (~1.5 x 1.8 m). They are as much about their subjects, however elusive, as they are about color. In “Tending and Receiving” (2026), Borteh lays down a semi-transparent ground of different densities of magenta into which she paints two containers of plants. A diagonal rift rising from the bottom right edge, with visible brushstrokes laid across the rift at an angle, divides them from what might be a third.
