LOYAL is pleased to present A Far Cry, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Madeleine Bialke, her first solo exhibition with the gallery and her third time exhibiting with us. The exhibition is comprised of five oil paintings on canvas in which Bialke’s use of shifting color, light, and perspective tests the emotional and structural possibilities of landscape painting.

Color and light register immediately in Madeleine Bialke’s paintings. Deep oranges, pinks, and blues carry a saturated intensity, where color functions less as description and more as a carrier of sensation. Light does not follow a fixed source, but appears to originate from within the image and reflect back across it. The result is physical. Heat, brightness, and atmosphere are felt before the image is fully read.

Trees anchor the work. They are not described in detail, yet their presence is unmistakable. Complex systems of foliage, sky, water, and light are compressed into rounded, continuous shapes that streamline the image without emptying it of force. The trees take on a subtle, almost engineered quality while remaining fully immersed within and connected to their environment. They are not set apart from our contemporary world, nor presented as untouched. They exist within it, affected by it, while still carrying their own distinct presence.

These tubular forms create an interconnected visual system, pushing through the composition with a quiet precision. They repeat, cluster, and extend in ways that approach the logic of constructed systems without losing their organic quality. There is a proximity here to Léger and Tubism, where form is organized through cylinders and repetition, though in Bialke’s work this logic emerges through the natural world rather than the industrial one.

Bialke’s focus on trees is sustained and deliberate, returning to them consistently in her paintings, not as passive elements, but as presences that exist in relation to one another. Trees are increasingly understood not as isolated entities, but as interconnected organisms that communicate, share resources, and respond collectively to their environment, carrying forms of intelligence and relation that largely remain invisible. Rather than rendering these systems directly, Bialke reduces and reorganizes them through color, light, and form, allowing their complexity to remain felt within the painting.

In this group of works, that return becomes more personal. The paintings draw from the Adirondack Mountains, where Bialke has been visiting since childhood, but now, living in London, they have come to feel “a far cry” from her present surroundings. The scenes persist, but the perspective begins to shift as they are revisited.

She describes this shift through what she calls “memory watching,” the experience of seeing an image change with each encounter, producing a different version each time. Adapting John Cheever’s comments on writing to painting, Bialke describes the process as drawing from “a substratum of memory that was imperfectly understood.” With each return come new associations, shaped by what has been seen and experienced in the meantime.

The works also introduce doubled conditions within the same image: reflections, projections, and parallel states where one form exists alongside another version of itself. Bialke was thinking about Scandinavian paintings such as The Horse Team by Edvard Munch and works by Halfdan Egedius, where paired forms suggest passages between life and death, presence and projection. She also connects aspects of the work to Virginia Woolf, where experience does not settle into a single shared reality, but exists across overlapping perspectives. Throughout the exhibition, warmth gathers and recedes, images pause and return, and the landscape continues to shift as it is revisited.

Across the works in A Far Cry, Bialke revisits this formative landscape not to preserve it, but to test how memory and form continue to evolve through painting. The resulting works are simultaneously intimate, uncanny, and structurally precise. The trees remain the central force, not as backdrop or symbol, but as living structures carrying memory, relation, and vitality.

Madeleine Bialke (b. 1991, Ithaca, NY) lives and works in London, UK. Bialke received an MFA from Boston University in 2016, after completing her BFA at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in 2013. Recent solo exhibitions include Newchild Gallery, Huxley-Parlour, Nemeth Art Center. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Max Hetzler, Alexander Berggruen, LOYAL, Nassima Landau Foundation, Museu Inimá de Paula, Jack Siebert Projects, among others. Her work is included in the collections of Beth Rudin DeWoody and Fundacion MEDIANOCHE0. Madeleine Bialke is represented by Newchild Gallery.