Alessandro Berni Gallery is pleased to present Gesture, Perception, Identity, a three-person exhibition featuring Denise Jones Adler, Lauralee Franco, and Eva March on view from June 4 through June 14, 2026. Through distinct visual languages, the exhibition explores painting not as representation alone, but as an act of psychological excavation: gesture as instinct, perception as instability, identity as something continuously assembled and undone. Opening Reception: Thursday, June 4, 6–9 PM
Denise Jones Adler constructs layered dreamscapes where painting, collage, photography, and drawing coexist like fragments of memory surfacing from the subconscious. Drawing from mythology, personal narrative, and symbolic archetypes, Adler transforms the canvas into a shifting terrain between intimacy and collective memory. Her works unfold through accumulation and chance, balancing geometric structures with emotional dissonance, as if identity itself were being rewritten in real time.
Lauralee Franco engages directly with the enduring legacy of Abstract Expressionism while resisting its gravitational pull toward repetition. As critic Peter Frank observed, “Lauralee Franco, for instance, has inherited the Abstract Expressionist mantle without disappearing into it. She has fit its energy to her vision and refined her vision with its energy.” Franco’s paintings carry the force of gesture without collapsing into spectacle. Their choreographies of marks, eruptions, and suspended forms evoke what Frank described as “the chaos of your brushes and paints is the true gesture.” Her canvases hover between cosmic vastness and personal intimacy, where abstraction becomes both emotional record and existential navigation.
Entirely self-taught in her beginnings, Eva March developed a practice guided first by instinct before refining her language through formal studies at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Her work moves between figuration and abstraction with remarkable chromatic intensity, propelled by what she describes as the spontaneous revelation of the unconscious. Color, for March, is vital: an immediate transcription of emotion, spirituality, and human interiority. Her paintings radiate a physical energy that favors freedom over calculation, gesture over control, allowing symbolic forms to emerge from the turbulence of paint itself.
Together, the three artists approach painting as an unstable mirror: one capable of revealing psychic traces, emotional residue, and the invisible architectures beneath perception. Gesture, Perception, Identity proposes not fixed definitions, but a field of movement where the self remains fluid, fractured, and profoundly alive.
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 6 PM
Sunday by appointment only
