MAUD MADSEN

Dweller

Opening: Friday, September 5th, 6-8 PM

September 5th - October 2nd, 2025

Daylight is not a monolith: seasons change, moods change and so does the intensity of the sun. The tilted angles of winter means those sunbeams travel greater distances and arrive to us a little weaker, a little cooler. For her 2025 exhibition, “Dweller,” Maud Madsen offers a glimpse into her first snow scenes, surprising given that she hails from Edmonton, Canada. But the time of year is secondary here to the theme of housing, structure, inhabitation. Because all of the artist’s compositions deal with childhood memories, Maud is also quite literally dwelling on the past. The double meaning of her show title is a kind of trick mirror or maybe force multiplier concentrating our attention on the spaces (many self-created) that her figures occupy.

In Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space the author observes, “If we go deeper into daydreams of nests, we soon encounter a sort of paradox of sensibility. A nest-and this we understand right away-is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security.” With these new oil paintings, Maud is revealing the private construction of a pillow fort or the temporary found shelter of a tree branch laden with snow, while speaking to the need and - yes - surprise of safety/solitude and the autonomy of privacy established as children in such temporary environments, our rudimentary forays into externalized universe creation.

Maud Madsen (b. 1993,  Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Madsen received her BFA from the University of Alberta and MFA from the New York Academy of Art. She has been a recipient of the Chubbs Post-Graduate Fellowship at the New York Academy of Art, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, and the New York Foundation for the Arts’ Canadian Women Artists’ Award.