“The airglow is a dusty greenish yellow. Beneath it in the gap between atmosphere and earth is a fuzz of neon which starts to stir. It ripples, spills, it’s smoke that pours across the face of the planet; the ice is green, the underside of the spacecraft an alien pall. The light gains edges and limbs; folds and opens. Strains against the inside of the atmosphere, writhes and flexes. Sends up plumes. Fluoresces and brightens. Detonates then in towers of light. Erupts clean through the atmosphere and puts up towers two hundred miles high. At the top of the towers is a swathe of magenta that obscures the stars, and across the globe a shimmering hum of rolling light, of flickering, quavering, flooding light, and the depth of space is mapped in light. Here the flowing, flooding green, there the snaking blades of neon, there the vertical columns of red, there the comets blazing by, there the close stars that seem to turn, there the far stars fixed in the heavens, beyond them the specks that can barely be seen.”

— Samantha Harvey, Orbital (2023)

OCHI is pleased to present Three Moments of an Explosion, an exhibition of new paintings by Serbian-American artist Nevena Prijić, marking her first solo presentation with the gallery.

The works on view begin as drawings and material studies on transparent and translucent sheets of mylar. Layering these sheets, the artist composes scenes that harmonize their chaotic and discrete parts. Through photography, the sensuous qualities of the stacks’ dimensionality, shadows and edges, are captured, projected and enlarged onto canvas. Scaled-up lines, marks and forms, rendered in oil with studious precision, reveal new worlds teeming with strange life.

What is left is energy, movement, light; the record of change itself. Through painting, Prijić seeks parallel worlds that mirror our own, where corporal bodies and galaxies entwine. Suspended between the analytic lens of a microscope and the persuant gaze of a telescope, she discovers images that appear to reveal the spectral conditions of creation. Atoms split, cells multiply, matter streaks across undulating magnetic fields, a billion tiny particles model an abstract space on the cusp of the real.