AETHERSCAPES AND EFFICACIES: BIOMORPHIC DRAWINGS BY FRANCES SMOKOWSKI

(SEPTEMBER 18 - OCTOBER 25, 2025)

Cavin-Morris Gallery is pleased to announce a one-person exhibition of two series of drawings by Frances Smokowski entitled “Efficacies” and “Aetherscapes” from Thursday, September 18th through Saturday, October 25th, 2025.

Imagine viewing the macrocosmic universe through a microscope lens, your eye the eye of a visionary-focused perspective charting the actual peregrinations of a bloodstream without limits, without formal dimensionality, without geophysical rules, and you will have an inkling of the visually lovely complexities of this mostly black and white work.

This is a nod to a surrealism that steps off the edge of the mainstream art world yet remains completely Contemporary.  It is the palpable blood of a waterless ocean.  It is something huge that is never less than obsessively personal but open to multiple worlds.  It is a conference of impossible life forms ebullient and organic.

 Allan Graubard says in his introductory essay to the to the Aetherscapes series: 

 Automatism, entrancements, accidents, reciprocations, metamorphoses - - the hand guiding the eye, the eye guiding the hand - luminous gestures, transparencies, distillations, effervescent joy and muted diminuendos, accents of ritual specific to the artist yet open to others, all this and more characterize Frances Smokowski’s “Aetherscapes”. 

In an introduction to the Efficacies series, artist Alessandro Keegan writes:

Leaves, buds and seeds twist and intertwine in an infinite, untouched expanse.  A pendulous excrescence dangles in space like a ripe milkweed pod.  Cell clusters sprouting antennae and cilia seem to swim in directionless loops. Tangles of veins, knotted arteries, charcoal black vessels, and misty, rhizomatic tendrils extend from the light beyond into cosmic holes or soft fleshy orifices. Though bodily in texture and movement, the forms of Smokowski’s art are magical in their ability to appear and then evanesce before the eye.  The amorphous, biological-appearing forms suggest the flesh inside of the body, while the vast space that frames these creations hints at a limitless universe beyond, an etheric place of mind, light and soul.

The artist has published two catalogs, one for each body of work in exhibition from which the above quotations are taken.  They will be available for sale at the show.

For further information please contact info@cavinmorris.com or call us at 212-226-3768.