KARL is pleased to present The Field Was Never Empty opening April 24th, 6–8pm. This cross-generational exhibition brings together the work of Marcia Hafif, Belinda Lee, Chandrika Marla, Anna Grace Nwosu, Anne Schaefer, and Gina Werfel.

 

Anchored by the work of Marcia Hafif (1929–2018), the presentation features artists who rigorously investigate the “field,” the canvas or structure that holds and shapes unique compositions. For over six decades, Hafif systematically explored painting’s fundamental components: color, medium, brushstroke, and support. Though her work often echoes the lived world such as the facades of Roman architecture, the depth of the night sky, or a specific slant of a sunset, she was long misidentified simply as a monochrome painter. As a result, Hafif did not receive the same critical parity as her male contemporaries. Between her MoMA PS1 exhibition in 1990 and her passing in 2018, galleries in the United States mounted only six solo exhibitions of her work. Despite this, she never stopped creating.

 

Working within Hafif’s lineage, Chandrika Marla continues to develop an abstract practice that examines emotional and psychological space. Each painting is constructed through the application of flat layers using a paint roller, alternating between opaque passages and translucent glazes. The sinuous border separating one color field from another becomes, in her words, “the place where the dialogue happens.”

 

Like Marla, Anne Schaefer’s work also embodies the idea that meaning emerges at the edges where forms meet. She approaches her compositions through a sustained investigation of gesture and accumulation. The field, in her work, is neither stable nor predetermined, but continually negotiated through the physical act of painting, holding traces of time, revision, and embodied movement. In turn, her paintings provide the viewer a generous space to experience what unfolds through prolonged acts of both making and looking.

 

Emerging from plein air painting, Gina Werfel moved to abstraction creating works that reference the natural world while combining multiple visual languages. She balances precise, graphic lines and stenciled forms with fluid, organic gestures. As Karen Wilkin has written, “She celebrates the painter’s role in transferring pigment to surface, deploying a wide vocabulary of gestures to weave loose, all-over, pulsating fabrics across the canvas, conjuring up intense sensations of light and air. While Werfel’s paintings can seem to allude to nature and to perceptions of our surroundings, in general, they are also emphatically about the act of painting” (The Hudson Review, Autumn 2024). 

 

Similarly, Belinda Lee draws inspiration from the landscape utilizing restrained palettes and nuanced tonal shifts. Her paintings unfold slowly, inviting sustained looking, as subtle variations in color and surface suggest spatial depth. Through a rotating vocabulary of forms such as trees, thickets, and ponds at varying levels of obfuscation, the field becomes a site where repetition highlights differences implying how our lived experiences are based on perspective. 

 

Anna Grace Nwosu extends these inquiries into three dimensions through ceramics, where surface, volume, and texture interact. Working primarily with hand-built stoneware, Nwosu creates textured surfaces and abstract patterns that echo landscapes, topographies, and the histories embedded within clay itself.

 

Rather than positioning the field as open or awaiting inscription, the exhibition recognizes it as already inhabited and formed through an ongoing engagement that continues to shape abstraction today. Whether through monochrome painting, gestural abstraction, or ceramics, the field emerges not as an empty ground, but as a charged site of accumulation and one marked by decades of labor, memory, and persistence that continues to reverberate across generations of artists.