Alicia Adamerovich and Christopher Daharsh: We'll Understand It When We're Older

This exhibition marks the first two-person presentation of works by Alicia Adamerovich and Christopher Daharsh, and their first exhibition in Wellington. Married and based in New York, the artists share a daily proximity that quietly informs their practices. Created in close dialogue, the paintings and works on paper gathered here reflect a period of personal and environmental transition.

The title, We’ll Understand It When We’re Older, gestures toward deferred clarity — the recognition that certain emotional states only fully reveal themselves in retrospect. Developed during a time of relocation and altered domestic rhythms, the works consider how interior psychological experience shifts alongside changes in landscape and season. Abstraction becomes a way of holding what language cannot yet resolve.

For this body of work, Adamerovich looked to artists such as Arshile Gorky and Arthur Dove — not as fixed touchstones, but as resonant interlocutors. Like them, she allows form to hover between landscape and interior vision. Biomorphic shapes cluster, tilt, and radiate within ambiguous atmospheric space, acting as conduits for projected feeling rather than literal figures. Color is structured by mood and light: saturated passages can feel citrus-bright and destabilizing, while muted tonalities create atmospheres of quiet or suspended tension. The paintings oscillate between tenderness and unease, intimacy and estrangement.

Daharsh, in developing these paintings, found himself thinking about Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, and particularly the Finnish painter Pekka Halonen. After moving to a more rural home marked by long winters and heavy snowfall, the experience of painting through winter became central. Halonen’s snowy landscapes — their stillness, compression, and psychological quiet — offered a point of reflection as Daharsh worked through his own shifting terrain. His oil and charcoal paintings accumulate through walking, looking, and memory; forms swell and cluster like growth pushing upward through frozen ground. The surfaces feel geological and atmospheric at once, shaped as much by season as by emotion. The works on paper register a more immediate tempo, tracing gestures that suggest drift, thaw, and gradual emergence.

Installed together, the eleven works form a shared field of atmosphere rather than a mirrored dialogue. The artists’ references emerge from the particular needs of these paintings — seasonal, psychological, situational — rather than allegiance to any singular lineage. What binds the exhibition is not stylistic sameness, but a mutual sensitivity to transition: to the ways environment, memory, and anticipation subtly reshape perception over time.

Artist Talk and Reception: Wednesday, Feb 18 5:00 - 8:00PM

Regular Hours: Sun-Tues 1-5PM, other days by appointment