Alexandre Gallery is pleased to present Ornithology, an exhibition of new works by Stephen Westfall. Acting as a miniature survey, the exhibition will feature new paintings, works on paper and a large-scale mural installation celebrating Westfall’s decades-long experimentation with color, planarity, and form. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition since 2021.

An exaltation of larks, a charm of finches, a murmuration of starlings. Drawn from the title of one of the monumental paintings featured in the exhibition, Ornithology alludes to several of the influences and resonances within Westfall’s practice; invoking the structured improvisation of Charlie “Bird” Parker and his eponymous tune, the geometric nature of migratory flight patterns, and the angularity of avian beaks. In Barnet Newman’s famous words, “aesthetics is for artists what ornithology is for the birds.”

The exhibition will showcase Westfall’s investigation of aesthetics and the color plane—featuring intimately scaled gouaches and larger paintings on canvas—with the largest work measuring over seven feet tall. As he paints, Westfall carefully considers planes of color, laying them flush to a neighboring plane by brush. Over time, his planar shapes and compositions have gradually let go of a strict relationship to the grid, to the point that some of his work leaves the grid behind altogether while still hewing to patterned repetition of forms, most often diamonds.

While still insistent on abstraction, Westfall’s recent paintings embrace a more flexible range of movement, conjuring geometric elements more evocative of landscape and the figure. Living and working in the country, he often perceives figuration emerging out of the patterns of the landscape, like “ghosts stepping out of wallpaper.” Here, the paintings act as figures themselves, carrying the spirits of painterly influence from Arthur Dove, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and others.