Carly Glovinski – Into the Garden

After a decade of steadily drawing nearer, Carly Glovinski’s third solo exhibition with Morgan Lehman Gallery finds the artist at a precise intersection of studio practice and gardening. “Into the Garden” gathers a variety of new, painting-focused works that grow from Glovinski’s sustained engagement with gardening, where cycles of planting, tending, collecting, and cataloging have become central to the way she thinks about making. The exhibition also marks her return to canvas after nearly two decades, bringing her relationship to traditional painting into focus within a practice that has long moved fluidly between materials and processes.

Glovinski’s recent work emerges from three gardens that have shaped her practice in recent years. The first is Wild Knoll Foundation Garden, a site-specific living work and community garden created by Glovinski on the grounds of the former home of writer May Sarton in southern Maine, now part of the Surf Point artist residency. The second is poet and writer Celia Thaxter’s garden on Appledore Island, five miles off the Maine coast. Best known through Thaxter’s book “An Island Garden” (1894), the historic flower garden has long stood as a sanctuary for creative life. During the summer of 2025, Glovinski spent time in residence on the island, working directly from the reconstructed beds, making plein air studies while also participating in the daily care required to sustain the garden. The third is her personal garden, established following her recent relocation to southern Maine.

Across these sites, gardening became a powerful mode of attention, a deeply felt act of care, and a continuation of a shared history. Long interested in the behavior of everyday materials and systems of ordering, from weaving and patterning to indexing and accumulation, Glovinski has made the cultivation and study of gardens the foundational discipline of her practice.

Central to the exhibition are acrylic paintings on canvas that interpret the gardens while also functioning as intimate portraits of the artist’s connection to cultivating these spaces. The works depict moments of nurturing seedlings, gathering flowers, watering, and catching her own shadow among the plants. Through washy, gestural brushwork, each painting evokes both the physical environment and the embodied experience of fleeting golden moments spent inside the garden.
Several large-scale, shaped, wall-based works extend a long-standing series in which magnified representations of pressed flowers move between representational painting and sculptural form. From a distance, the works read as botanical specimens rendered with precision; up close, surfaces loosen into washes and gestures of paint. A related group of framed paintings presents pressed flowers at true scale on herbarium paper, the archival material traditionally used to mount botanical specimens. Together, these works form a speculative herbarium that merges scientific classification with painterly interpretation.

In the “Field Folio” series, Glovinski combines paint and cut paper to create small meadow-like compositions that burst with tangled blades of grass outward from a textless page. Without a fixed horizon, these works hold a specific point of view, looking down, the way we look at a small plant in the ground, or a book, or a phone: immersed.

Before these works could exist, the gardens themselves had to be built and tended. By absorbing their cycles of cultivation, Glovinski has shaped a reciprocal practice where attention, care, and painting converge, allowing this luminous exhibition to emerge.

Gallery hours Tue-Sat 11 am – 6 pm, and by appointment

Exhibition Duration 23 April – 06 June 2026

www.morganlehmangallery.com

Location:
Morgan Lehman Gallery
526 West 26th Street, 4th Floor
10001 New York, NY
United States