Perrotin New York is pleased to present Power Line, an exhibition of works by the Yale School of Art Painting and Printmaking Graduate Class of 2025. Through painting, sculpture, or installation, these artists share a deep engagement with materiality, memory, identity, and transformation. The exhibition marks Perrotin's third collaboration with Yale School of Art, following an online presentation in 2020 and at our New York gallery in 2023.
At the end of Plato’s Republic, poets and painters are banished from the perfect state. Masters of mimesis, artists, whether they use words or “colors and figures,” are condemned for being “mere imitators.” They do not seek reality; rather, they delight in its passing appearances. As if holding up a magic mirror, they multiply false images and illusory reflections of the world, leading us astray from reason and truth.
Art must be kept in order because it can express such a powerful likeness, a fiction of how things are or could be. But Plato was also a poet. He invents a fantasy of the ideal society, along with its light and shadows, rules and hierarchies, scenes and myths. His fabled philosophical dialogues, in their ever-renewable questioning, enact an original poetics. They inquire into making by giving shape to the continual unfolding of the imagination.
The artists in this exhibition of the Yale School of Art’s MFA Program in Painting and Printmaking are not, and arguably never have been, in pursuit of the classic painterly task of depiction or deception. Many of their practices turn away from inherited models and systems of aesthetic value. Instead, they create their own distinctive poetics to ask what art can do, taking what is readily at hand to explore the essential mutability of their materials, their desires, and their perceptions.
Paint and canvas are present here. So is trash, steel, soil, wood, wax, glitter, plastic, linoleum, watercolor, embroidery, clay, architectural supports and ornamental motifs, digital screenshots, props for ritual, and other barely noticeable bits and imprints of daily detritus. Through both highly calibrated and purely accidental processes, these mixed media and matter have been molded and burnt, dyed and scattered, silkscreened, torn, cut, layered, compressed, and repurposed until emerging, almost entirely, as something else.
Ways of seeing and knowing have been similarly tested to alter or intensify experience. Forms conflagrate and fade while observed outdoors, in the dark, at night; persistent symbols are discovered in graphite dream drawings; and new tools roughly devised to extend the textural sweep of a gesture. A landscape might be of a sensation; a still life a memory carefully arranged; or a portrait a story told through scale and abstraction. Confession and lies compose the same, unresolved plane; patterns repeat into shaded hues of doubt and depth. Painting questions itself.
The works of these artists start with the world as is. They then play adventurously in that precise space between what a thing is, in this one, and what it could be, in another. The other worlds that they imagine—their varied surfaces, ineffable colors, figures wavering in two dimensions—exist nowhere but in the unexpected lines of feeling, the relations of response and recognition, these works may open within us. This is a place of vital, if partial, freedom. It is where the self and the social overlap, and where art’s true powers of connection, not copying, begin.
— Jennifer Pranolo
Ana Claudia Almeida (b. 1993, Rio de Janeiro) is an artist drawn to the physicality of materials, exploring how they interact and juxtapose to create movement. Engaging with ambiguity and contrast, her work navigates the intersections of architecture, and social structures, while simultaneously reflecting on the relationships between bodies, spaces, and systems of gender, religion, and sexuality. Often working across painting, sculpture, drawing, and video, Almeida constructs an evolving ecosystem of forms and textures. A co-founder of the collective Trovoa in Brazil, she has been an active participant since 2017.
Bix Archer (b. 1997, San Francisco) is an artist whose practice explores the limits of perception and vision through painting and printmaking. She engages with light and darkness as subjects—rendering what cannot be looked at directly, but only felt through its shadows or imprints. Moving between the studio and the outdoors, Archer’s recent works emerge from nocturnal observations, painting under the shifting conditions of fading light, advancing tides, and the glow of a headlamp. Her process embraces the instability of the seen and unseen, weaving together memory, landscape, and sensory impressions. By integrating studies, models, and experimental tools like viewfinders and camera obscuras, Archer constructs images that blur the boundary between direct observation and imagined perception.
Rosa Bozhkov (b. 1995, New York, NY) approaches painting and drawing as a process of thinking, reaching beyond memory and language. Her work unfolds through a confusion of timelines, where observation transforms into an unknown destination—blending fabricated with remembered stories. Objects and fields of color emerge through close looking. The materiality of paint itself mirrors the act of remembering—distorting, layering, and condensing into shifting, fluid narratives.
Claire (Won Jeong) Chey (b. 1997, Seoul) is a painter whose work navigates the material and visual possibilities of paint as a vessel for desire, shame, trauma, fantasy, and ecstasy—sensations repressed within the human body. Through layered surfaces and expressive gestures, Chey explores the tension between what is concealed and revealed, transforming psychological states into visceral compositions. Based in New Haven, Connecticut, her practice delves into the intersections of materiality and emotion, uncovering the latent forces that shape human experience.
Taína Cruz (b. 1998, New York) lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. Her multidisciplinary practice—including painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and installation—is rooted in folklore, world-building, and the emotional residue of cultural memory. Guided by intuition and an embodied approach to making, Cruz allows tactile experience, emotional resonance, and sensory response to lead the evolution of her work. Her practice reflects on what is concealed, transformed, or forgotten—drawing from African-American and Caribbean traditions as well as the visual languages of technology, graffiti, and everyday urban ephemera. Figures, landscapes, and objects emerge in flux, offering encounters that hold emotional complexity and resist fixed meaning.
Anietié Ekanem (b. 1996, London) is an artist whose practice explores the dialectics of Blackness, pre-colonial spirituality, and contemporary diasporic identities. Working across painting, printmaking, moving image, and performance, Ekanem navigates the space between figuration and abstraction, revealing the tensions between belonging and displacement. Rooted in memory and process, their work transforms critical theory into tangible visual narratives, challenging representations of Black personhood and Black futurities. Engaging with both artistic practice and theoretical discourse, Ekanem’s research delves into Black Aesthetics and pre-colonial histories, examining how ideas traditionally conveyed through text can be equally potent in visual form.
Lauren Flaaen (b. 1985, Los Angeles, CA) creates sculptural paintings that blur the boundary between body and object. Cutting, sewing, and reconstructing canvas, they transform traditional painting into corporeal assemblages that explore the tensions between fragility and strength, trauma and renewal, tenderness and violence. She is a recipient of the Yale Pathways Teaching Fellowship, the Joseph and Emily Gidwitz Scholarship, and the FIRE (Foundry Invitational + River Exhibition) Scholarship.
Flores (b. 1999 San Salvador, El Salvador) received his BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Drawing on an architectural framework, his work changes the audience’s perception of viewing. The eye becomes the means of breaching a world bereft of its senses, and accords viewers the space that’s necessary for form to emerge through feeling, guided by the human hand.
Erol Scott Harris II (b. 1989, Chicago) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work navigates material, identity, and memory through a sculptural language built from synthetic flooring. Working primarily with faux marble vinyl, Harris explores themes of labor, surface, and transformation—embedding bodily impressions and painterly gestures into an industrial substrate. His work draws on personal and inherited histories, particularly those of his grandparents who migrated from Guanajuato, Mexico, and worked as floorers and railroad laborers. Using methods rooted in performance and printmaking, Harris examines how imprints—both physical and emotional—shape our perception of stability, desire, and place.
Diego León (b. 1995, San Diego) is a painter and educator whose practice resists efficiency and embraces the uncertain space between legibility and obscurity. Engaging with overlooked and discarded objects, he finds resonance in items that are considered trash. Since 2020, he has been meticulously notating everything, driven by a belief in the inherent value of all things. Through his work, León challenges conventional hierarchies of worth, transforming fragments of the everyday into layered visual narratives.
Rayer Ma (b. 1994, China) is an artist who transforms everyday materials. Through the interplay of color, texture, age, and gravity, she arranges an re-encounter with the familiar, inviting viewers into a space of full-body attention. Ma’s practice motions toward the collapse of subject and object, living and nonliving, form and formlessness. It proposes a re-imagination of hegemonic value systems through an ongoing inquiry of the attitude of creativity.
Rose McBurney (b. 1976, Santa Cruz, CA) is a painter whose work interrogates the interplay between internalized structures of power and the formal language of painting. Drawing from a degraded palette sourced from YouTube home movies, McBurney reanimates digitally mediated colors into analog forms, invoking a simultaneous sense of past and future. Her compositions–developed through thumbnail sketches and executed in a single layer of oil on linen–reflect a commitment to constraint, material investigation, and conceptual depth. Through motifs of dreams, symbols, and embodied gesture, McBurney explores painting as a site of resistance and reflection, where abstraction and figuration coalesce and where temporality becomes a subject in itself.
Paulina Moncada (b. 1998, Antioquia, Colombia) explores time, symbols, and the semiotic landscapes of the Andean mountains. Investigating ecosystems as fields of meaning, she maps silent encounters between animals and humans, landscapes and diagrams, ordinary objects and idiosyncratic collections. Playing with figures that blend together, interior spaces that look like exteriors, or still-lifes that resemble astronomical entities, her work questions different notions of time. For Moncada, painting is an atlas, where absence and presence are signs of possibility.
Hafsa Nouman (b.1998) is a Pakistani visual artist based in New Haven, CT. Nouman’s practice deconstructs colonial hierarchies embedded in patriarchal spaces, both monumental and domestic. Her critical focus is rooted in the relationship between ‘object’ and ‘painting’ which often results in visual excavations of architectural thresholds: such as doors, walls, and wrought iron patterns. Through those thresholds, Nouman creates a spatial logic that brings attention to the painted objects’ histories and material realities in a way that allows them to be re-embodied in the gallery space.
Z.T. Nguyễn (b. 1997, United States) is an artist whose practice engages with the psychological space located between stasis and change. Working primarily in drawing, they meticulously render monochromatic images of bodies and nocturnal spaces that give form to the rich textures of rumination, desire, secrecy, and dreaming. Nguyễn's work asks whether our current reality is inevitable and what it would cost to alter the course of the present—whether through personal revelation or radical change. Nguyễn's first solo exhibition, Facts Are Bigger in the Dark, is on view from May 16 until July 12, 2025 at island, New York.
Haejin Park (b. 1992, South Korea) is a painter who uses watercolor as a fluid emotional archive. Through bleeding hues, she constructs raw, expressive faces— diaries of acceptance that hover between presence and absence. Her fragmented figures, bruised with inks, immerse her complex narratives into fleeting bursts of color. Park searches for honesty, allowing each painting to unveil its own tender ghost.
Purvai Rai (b. 1994) is a mixed media artist whose practice is deeply rooted in the land, memory, and cultural landscapes of Punjab. Engaging with themes of ancestry, ecology, community, and oral history, she examines Punjab as a living archive—one shaped by shifting socio-political, economic, and spatial realities. Her work navigates placemaking through an auto-ethnographic lens on collective identity and generational inheritance, tracing the intersections of colonialism, feudalism, capitalism, and classism. Collaborating with women artisans from her ancestral village, Nawanpind Sardaran, Rai incorporates traditional crafts such as knitting, embroidery, crocheting, and weaving, fostering an environment of mutual exchange and social cohesion. Through material and gesture, her work transforms family memories and oral histories into tactile, multivalent symbols.
Jam Yoo (b. 1993, Baton Rouge, LA) is a painter whose work navigates cultural ambiguity, power dynamics, and the liberatory potential of figuration. Moving between South Korea and the United States throughout childhood, Yoo’s early sense of self was shaped by transnational movement, social repression, and exposure to religious and national iconographies that functioned simultaneously as aesthetic forms and ideological tools. Drawing became a means of autonomy, starting in childhood, when copying Japanese and Korean manga offered an early language for expression that later deepened into explorations of identity, queerness, and diasporic experience. Influenced by the idea of “internal exile,” as described by artist R.B. Kitaj, Yoo’s paintings trace states of suspension—figures caught in the haze of the elements, overgrowth, and structural forms, poised between confidence and doubt. Ornamentation and narrative serve to question, unravel, and reclaim hybridity, lineage, and the boundaries of (in)authenticity.
Nadia Younes (b. 1999, Nazareth) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work spans painting, installation, video, sculpture, and writing. Drawing from her Palestinian-Russian heritage and experiences across Israel, Mali, Mauritania, and Jordan, she examines themes of confession, embodiment, and identity, navigating the liminal space between life and death. Younes’ practice transforms cold, industrial materials into living, visceral entities, often depicting construction sites and industrial landscapes as bodies imbued with emotion and memory. Through material experimentation, she uncovers hidden narratives within overlooked environments, exploring the fragility and resilience embedded in human experience.
