Gillian Theobald: Fold & Folding

September 6 - October 11, 2025

Abstraction is tricky, and often collapses into rigorous yet cold exercises in geometrical formality. Theobald’s paintings are abstract, but rather than simply withdrawing from realism, they embody their own calculus. Drawing on Impressionism’s approach to seeing light over detail, which led to the pure color of Rothko and the luminosity of Turrell, Theobald builds spaces with light and color that feel substantial yet needing no particular referent. If Action Painting was an attempt to free painting from the tyranny of narrative by building up trace histories of gesture(s), then Theobald’s Fictional Spaces are action painting at the speed of trees. She manages to build a sense of place through iterative mark making, one line, one color leading to the next. For me her work creates a sense of the familiar yet hazy-in-memory, a meditative view of flora we’ve all seen throughout our travels, though may not have remarked on. I find her work to be gentler and more organic in their construction and their experience.

One thing that strikes me is the relationship between these landscapes and her compressed paper constructions, collages of a sort I guess, but also a grownup version of pressed flowers. Plucked from packaging and other ephemera/detritus of a modern age, Theobald creates geometrical abstractions that, like her landscapes, retain an organic warmth as they explore line, shape and color over the original history of the material. And I guess this is a secret to her work in general: a quality of seeing and presenting what it’s like to unfocus your eyes away from detail in order to get to an overall sense of things.

While this folding, compressing, flattening, essentially may not be Theobald’s working center of gravity – other landscapes she’s exhibited demonstrate her deep and abiding interest in color, and ambiguous perception – these works give a peek behind the curtain if you will. There is formalism, but it is her own, and grows out of a painter's love of color and line, as well as the tension of fitting space and volume into a flat plane. 

-Christian French