MADRID.- Galería Elvira González is presenting Natural, the first solo exhibition in Europe by the painter Dana Powell (b. Milwaukee, 1989).
Powell’s small-scale paintings, created between 2024 and 2026, depict seemingly unrelated subjects. Roads lit by a car’s headlights, landscapes covered in an almost spectral fog, fruit still lifes, or lift doors that remain closed. No human figure ever appears, yet traces of human activity can be sensed in each of these works.
Each scene resembles a still from a psychological thriller, frozen a moment before something happens. With barely any detail or embellishment, the artist relies on tight shots and slightly blurred shapes to create a constant sense of ambiguity. The result is a series of scenes of suburban America in which the sense of unease stems not from the supernatural, but from the everyday turned hostile. Beneath the stillness of these scenes, a hint of menace surfaces. However, perhaps nothing will happen at all, and it is this uncertainty that lies at the heart of a body of work that distils the disquiet of the present day, with minimal means.
The thirty-one paintings in this show carry that unease into the realm of nature. Powell conceives each exhibition around an imaginary character. The character behind Natural is an amateur naturalist who sets out to observe birds and butterflies but keeps coming across evidence of human intervention on these expeditions. The title thus points to a boundary that ecological thought has been questioning for decades, the one that separates nature from culture.
Nevertheless, alongside this anxiety, Powell also seeks to awaken a sense of wonder at natural beauty. This wonder springs from the most fleeting things, the stripes of light filtered by blinds onto a bedroom wall, the shadows of branches across a lawn, and from the animals that coexist with us without ever being domesticated, such as the moth in Luna Moth, resting on the net of a tennis court. As the writer Jacobo Bergareche, author of the catalogue text accompanying the exhibition, puts it: "Only in unhurried, silent and distant contemplation is there any possibility of encountering these other lives that surround us."
The naturalist often travels by car, with several of the scenes framed by the windshield. The road trip, which American popular culture, from Kerouac to Route 66, has romanticised as a symbol of freedom, appears here stripped of any sense of the epic. Instead of highways, there are dirt tracks that disappear into the woods, with trees filing past in the mist. The scale follows suit. Faced with the monumentality characteristic of so much American painting, Powell works on intimate small-scale canvases that demand a closer, more attentive gaze.
This closeness has a purpose. Powell wants her paintings to convey a shared experience, which is why, she says, the highest compliment is for someone to tell her that a painting reminds them of something they once saw, or of a place they keep in their memory. For Powell, these are ultimately paintings about the human condition and about the power that an apparently ambiguous image can hold.
A catalogue has been published to accompany the exhibition, with thirty-one photographs and a text by the writer Jacobo Bergareche.
Dana Powell (b. Milwaukee, 1989) lives and works in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She graduated in Fine Art from the Cooper Union in 2015 and, the following year, completed a residency at Still House Group. She has had solo exhibitions at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, in both New York (Burner, 2019; Night Tripper, 2023; The Moon Is Still Free, 2025) and Los Angeles (Drinking Dust, 2021), and has taken part in group exhibitions such as The Lure of the Dark, curated by Susan Cross at MASS MoCA.
