Nara Roesler New York presents, throughout 2026—marking its 50th anniversary—a series of exhibitions conceived as encounters between artists from different generations, whose works establish resonances through formal and conceptual affinities. Among these dialogues, the exhibition On the Nature of Figures highlights the rapprochement between Amelia Toledo (1926–2017) and Cristina Canale (b. 1961), two artists whose practices, although distinct in media and procedures, converge in their investigation of form in relation to nature and to the structures that organize the visual field.
Amelia Toledo is a central figure in 20th-century Brazilian art, with a body of work that establishes decisive connections between modernism and contemporary art. In dialogue with artists such as Lygia Clark, Mira Schendel, and Lygia Pape, her work displaces the constructive tradition by incorporating natural processes, organic materials, and a sustained attention to space. In doing so, she reconfigures abstraction as a sensorial experience, marked by the presence of matter, the action of time, and dynamics inherent to the physical world.
Cristina Canale’s production is situated within this horizon while simultaneously updating it within the field of contemporary painting. Recognized as one of the leading painters of her generation, Canale develops compositions marked by dense and carefully constructed chromatic fields, in which figures emerge or dissolve within surfaces that evoke magmatic and oceanic atmospheres. Her painting articulates figure and ground as unstable instances, in which form appears to be continually in the process of formation or disappearance.
The rapprochement between the two artists is built upon this shared interest in the natural world and in form as process. In Toledo, this dimension manifests through the incorporation of materials and natural phenomena that tension and reorganize the structure of the work. In Canale, it appears in the pictorial construction, where color, gesture, and chromatic density operate as forces that configure and destabilize the image. In both cases, form presents itself as a field in transformation, in which both the forces that constitute it and the systems that sustain it become visible.