Wednesday April 16, 2025 | 6:30 PM
Open Studio: 4:00 – 8:00 PM
Location: Residency Unlimited
360 Court Street, Brooklyn NY 11231 (map)
Where does color belong when the field is displaced? If Color Field painting was about immersion—about experiencing color as a vast, retinal presence—Ahrens’ work asks: what happens when the field itself is removed, split, or suspended? What happens when color exists not as a fixed plane but as something encountered in space, subject to gravity, perception, and movement?
In this dialogue, RU artist Alena Ahrens views color as no longer a passive field but an active force—one that pulls, bends, and suspends itself in dialogue with the body and mind. Her paintings are displaced fields, fragments of a once-unified system that have been separated, reframed, or recontextualized while her arcs and string structures convey what remains stretched between presence, the passage of time, and absence, marking what was once whole and is now fragmented relying on three fundamental tenets:
- Perception is participatory – her work changes as you move, as light shifts, as the environment interacts.
- Color exists in relational tension – it is no longer bound by canvas but exists between forces, materials, and gravitational pull.
- Absence becomes presence – where the field is removed, a new kind of space emerges, one that is shaped by material form and a conceptual void.
Ahrens will also share aspects of her most recent work, Intervals of Humanity, which expands on these ideas by incorporating durational writing with the absence of color, and the phenomenology of waiting’s impact on perception.
About
Alena Ahrens (1979) is a contemporary American-Asian artist based in St. Louis, MO, working between the USA and Portugal. Her interdisciplinary practice expands painting and text beyond the retinal and pictorial, transforming color and language into an active, spatial experience. Through arcs, paintings, and performance, she creates participatory encounters that explore perception, presence, and the fluid boundaries of space and form. Her dissertation research developed a methodology that examines the intersection of space, shape, time, affect, embodiment, and narrative through contemplative practices to foster connection and empathy. Building on this foundation, her current work engages with the traditions of color field painting, expanding upon its lineage through a socio-cultural lens. She also experiments various modes of performance and writing to expand the material and temporal dimensions of embodiment and perceptual experience.
