Rosa Loy

Leipzig-based artist Rosa Loy unveils new paintings in her first solo exhibition in New York since 2008. It's on view now at the Lower East Side-based gallery Lyles & King.

Loy’s paintings depict fantastical worlds rife with symbols that reference art history, psychoanalysis, and her childhood in East Germany. She paints with casein, a water-based paint used for fresco since ancient times. The process allows layers of underpainting to show through in patches of color, which adds to the ambiguous nature of her surreal compositions. Scenes are similarly layered, populated by a cast of characters that would be at home in a fairytale: women harvesting braids that grow like wheat; a mermaid holding her newborn surrounded by midwives and chimeric attendants. The paintings conjure the dreamlike states of the unconscious and metamorphic moments of transformation.