Louis Buhl & Co. is pleased to present a new Salon Highlight with Detroit-based painter Gretchen Adel, opening March 15, 2025. Through an intricate process of layering and fragmentation, Adel’s work explores the essential interplay between creation and destruction, where figures, landscapes, and symbols emerge and dissolve in a state of perpetual flux.
Beginning with digital collages that weave together disparate elements—photographs of people, places, and objects—Adel develops complex and oftentimes awkward assemblages. Once translated onto the canvas, the imagery undergoes continuous fragmentation as the artist intuitively paints and rearranges figures and chromatic planes to address compositional challenges. Each resolution reveals unexpected visual pathways that offer glimpses of clarity amidst the foundational chaos. As Adel explains, “this ongoing practice is not about disintegration but about achieving balance and uncovering a deeper sense of wholeness through the repetition of shapes and colors within the tiers of the work.” The act of layering itself then becomes a metaphor for the broader existential cycles of becoming and unbecoming, representative of the “inescapable truth that creation and destruction are two halves of the same whole.”
To this end, the featured paintings underscore a myriad of dualities—interior and exterior, stillness and movement, containment and expansion, to name a few—echoing the inherent rhythms of transformation. The compositions are driven by an exploration of feminine consciousness, drawing on mythological and natural symbols in an attempt to discern these fundamental paradoxes. Shells, for instance, function as both sanctuary and vessel, referencing classical depictions of Venus, the divine embodiment of beauty and love. And flowers, traditionally emblematic of feminine virtue, are recontextualized by the artist as badges of resilience and self-actualization—a means of reclaiming power beyond submissive beauty. Further, the celestial forces of the sun and moon emerge as guiding elements throughout the exhibition, signifying the eternal push and pull between light and darkness.
These cosmic rhythms mirror the regenerative nature of Adel’s compositions, where figures oscillate between abstraction and legibility, their forms dissolving and reemerging across the canvas upon each glance. The archetypal women that she discovers engage in moments of solitude and introspection, their expressions turned inward or toward unseen horizons, settled in their sensuality, resilience, and quiet strength.
Salon Highlight: Gretchen Adel is on view from March 15 — May 15, 2025 at Louis Buhl & Co