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.
Left: Larissa Borteh, "Wind Gap" (2025), oil on canvas; right: Larissa Borteh, "The Edge" (2025), oil on canvas
The viscosity of the paint, and the trails left by the brush, activate the entire surface. On the left side, and anchoring the composition, two green stalks grow out of a large semi-transparent pot. We intuitively measure everything else’s legibility in the painting against this. The spectrum between legibility and opacity is the crux of Borteh’s paintings. We look at the world and instinctively name what we see based on our experience, and we are not always correct.
In “Glass House” (2025), one of two large paintings in the exhibition, we see three apparitional forms floating against a serene, pale blue-and-white sky-like ground. Situated on the far left, the most legible form consists of precise white smears that add up to a skull with teeth. Again, we intuitively measure the legibility of the other two forms against the skull, whose wispy lines appear on the brink of dissipation. We can read this as a comment on how much we comprehend or fail to in our daily life — evidence of how haunted we are by visions both imagined and real, and about how dislocated we feel as we negotiate the world. But as Borteh’s paintings show us, no matter where we are, and what we are doing, we are surrounded by beauty, decay, transformation, and turbulence.
Left: Larissa Borteh, "In Limbo" (2025), oil on canvas; right: Larissa Borteh, "Tending and Receiving" (2026), oil on canvas
Larissa Borteh: In the Wind continues at Devening Projects (3039 West Carroll Avenue, Chicago) through June 13. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
