Heather Day moved to the desert and found a new inspiration to create landscape paintings. At first, these works look like abstractions and instinctual gestures, which surely there are elements here that show this. But they often begin to take shape as desert landscapes, earth colors that have the shape of looking across a vast environment, almost as if closing your eyes after looking at the sun and into the arid distance. For her solo show Cut, Split, Horizon on view at Berggruen Gallery, Day is “building on the foundation of pioneering Abstract artists like Helen Frankenthaler, Etel Adnan, and Sophie Taeuber-Arp,” but also seems to channel the Transcendental Painting Group with these environmental meditations. —Evan Pricco
