Gladstone presents In the Absence of Paradise, an exhibition of new oil paintings by Nicholas Bierk in Brussels. Recognized for his psychologically charged still lifes, landscapes, and portraits, Bierk’s work collapses the distance between the extraordinary and the banal, revealing both transitory flashes of overlap between the past and the present, and the strange tension that undergirds all memory. Drawing from photography both formally and conceptually, these paintings touch upon themes that include intimacy, loss, trace, and the impossibility of permanence.

Rendered in a slightly larger scale than is typical of Bierk’s past work, these paintings amplify the undercurrent of psychic ambivalence that is hallmark to his practice. Oscillating between scenes that reference nature and domesticity, the artist recurrently mediates on the distance between the interior and the exterior, how it’s possible to evoke the familiar while simultaneously indicating the presence of something mysteriously alienated from ourselves.