Babst Gallery is pleased to present RIDE, a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Vanessa Conte. This is Conte’s first solo exhibition since her solo museum exhibition, BREAKNECK at Kunstbunker: Forum fur zeitgenoessische Kunst in Nuremberg in 2023.

In this new body of work, Conte eschews geographic and scenic markers, allowing the canvas-space to remain fully open and immersive, governed by its own gravitational laws and spatial logic. Contained within this space are life-sized female figures in modern clothing that surge through and move beyond the physical and painted frames of the canvas, creating moments of tension and release.

Conte’s densely layered painting surfaces behave like seismographic recordings, registering the kinetic energy of kicking, falling, and floating figures. The space around the figures reacts with bold calligraphic strokes and luminous ripples of color that reverberate to the edges of the canvas. At times, the boundaries of the body are completely dissolved, subsumed in the color-field of the surface. Other times, Conte strips the figure down to its skeletal core. This push-pull between gestural line and painterly form is as much a conversation about painting as it is the figures’ narrative trajectory.

Also included in the exhibition are Conte’s works on paper, where the physical qualities of the graphite and oil-stick draw attention to Conte's active drawing process. In these works, the paper’s bare surface can be seen even when the figures--either fully rendered or defined by a single line--grapple with the vibrant, muscular marks of oil stick.