Eleanor Johnson + Lydia Makin: Entanglements
Harper’s Chelsea 512
January 8 – February 14, 2026
Images courtesy of Harper’s Chelsea 512
At Harper’s Chelsea 512 Gallery, Eleanor Johnson and Lydia Makin are looking back to the beginning. The artists’ joint exhibition, Entanglements, is rife with Biblical allusions and Baroque influences; the paintings explore and dissect classical techniques, peeling back eons to find the eternal creative force glimmering below.
The exhibition opens with Makin’s Whispers of Azure, glinting in the front window like a coin at the bottom of a fountain. The viewer, once intrigued, is promptly frustrated; though Makin’s clustered blooms and spires are evocative of tropical flowers or underwater plant life, a closer look proves that there are no leaves, no petals, indeed no recognizable forms of any kind to be found. Following the movement of Makin’s brush, the eye is pulled in dizzying swoops across the canvas, never settling, tricked again and again by collisions of light and color that appear to suggest familiar shapes. There’s something here, the paint whispers—something that came from no earthly source. It demands to be followed.
Inside, the walls hum with energy. Makin and Johnson are united by an interest in motion, sacrificing form and detail to create a sense of urgent, relentless action. While Makin’s works suggest elements of the natural world, though, Johnson is concerned with the flesh; her figures, faceless and indistinct, are reduced to vehicles for movement as they buckle and grasp for one another. She Turned His Hands To Feet is particularly ruthless in its distortion of the human body; arms are frayed, bulbs of flesh swell, and rough-sketched hands flap uselessly over the roil of color and motion. But where there is destruction, there is potential. Johnson is showing us what the body can do, what it can be used to convey.
Johnson names Peter Paul Rubens as a direct influence, and it shows. Works like The Piggyback and Feeding Frenzy are reminiscent of Rubens’ historical tableaux if the latter were scrubbed of all signifiers of time, place, and allegory, baring the raging humanity that lies below.
If Johnson’s work is characterized by movement and energy, Makin’s explores the origin of that energy; her bright colors and abstract forms are suggestive of nascent life found in space or deep under the sea, pulsating in darkness as if still deciding on a final form to take. This unstable energy brims over in Paradise Lost, a massive triptych that commands a full wall of the gallery space. The three canvases, smoldering in black, orange, and red, evoke a powerful sense of the sublime; they are the source, the primordial fuel that pushes the rest of the exhibition. In borrowing the title of Milton’s masterpiece for this massive, labor-intensive piece, Makin is asking us to consider the violence of creation. This is what it takes to make a world. This is what it takes to make art.