Carl Sandburg College’s first art show of the new year highlights the work of alumna Madelyn Havens.
The opening reception for Havens’ exhibit, “Lingering Forms,” is from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 23 in the Sandburg Art Gallery in Building D on the college’s Galesburg campus.
The show and reception are free and open to the public.
The exhibit will remain on display through March 24. Regular gallery hours are weekdays from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
A 2019 Sandburg graduate, Havens is a Chicago-based abstract figurative painter whose work examines the physical and emotional complexities of the human form. Her paintings often center on themes of vulnerability, fragmentation, and the tension between softness and distortion.
Havens, also a Bushnell-Prairie City High School alumna, earned her bachelor’s degree in studio art from Knox College and a Master of Fine Arts from Illinois State University. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Heaven Gallery and Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, as well as Knox’s Borzello Gallery. She has also been featured in New American Paintings and shown at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport.
“Within my painting process, I explore bodily interiority and exteriority in relation to the surface of painting, evoking a discomforting sense of corporeal (dis)embodiment, where haunted flesh becomes palpable,” Havens said in a release. “Indexing conversations with the body into the painting is a way to understand my body and create an experience of what happens when language fails to capture the complexity of sensation. Painting becomes a mediation with the canvas, a constant discovery of what can give shape to the intangible: how it feels when my skin folds into itself, bodily urges and the soft texture of fatty tissue.”
More information about Havens is available online.