DC Moore Gallery presents Theresa Daddezio: Bloom, fifteen paintings created in the course of the past two years.

Theresa Daddezio’s paintings shed light, revealing speculative fictions and near-futures where human and plant forms entwine. Deeply rooted in abstraction and color theory, Daddezio builds worlds through seemingly impossible collisions and harmonies of color. Neither wholly synthetic nor organic, hues of lush magnetas, furious green-golds, and silver-purples cross-pollinate. Her sense of color evokes both late 20th-century transcendental abstraction and Orphic lyricism, resonating with the work of Sonia Delaunay, Ferdinand Leger, Agnes Pelton, and František Kupka.

Petal-like structures bloom from intricate linear forms, suggesting the botanical rhizome. Daddezio paints these as channels for transporting light, color, and energy across the canvas. Patterns replicate, and loop back onto themselves, becoming body-like forms or strands of code. These systems are in constant flux, operating according to their own mysterious parameters of space and time. Daddezio’s varied brushwork creates shifts between layers, openings and recesses within the plane of the painting.

Her recent work is inspired by a sense of mystery and intimacy within 14th-century Madonna and Child paintings from St. Agnes Monastery in Prague. Daddezio examines the spatial hierarchies and compositions of Medieval paintings through a lens of the flattening and fragmentation of contemporary space, developing pictorial realms: ground/underworld, middle/earth, and top/celestial. Ribbons and cords create links within this hierarchy of space. Imagery emerges, shifts, and transforms into new symbolic structures of the biological, conjuring scientific and religious quests for meaning.