Heather Day : Blue Distance
Current exhibition
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Works
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Overview
Heather Day (b. 1989, Honolulu, HI) is an artist based in the Mojave Desert of California. Her paintings explore overlapping themes of sensory perception, memory, and elements of the natural world.
Day builds vast inventories of painted forms that are taken apart, rearranged, and sewn back together in a concert of opposing forces and color fields. This counter-productive process embraces our limited control over chaos, and draws the viewer in through rhyming lyrical gestures and harmonizing fields of pigment. Her paintings, both in form and in color, are meant to challenge our expectations of the everyday experience and encourage the viewer to meditate on their own personal histories. How does the sound of a grating branch in the wind translate to an errant mark? How does a vibrating, painted wash capture raking light in the moments before sunset? This exploration seeks to push boundaries, evoking contemplation on the dynamic relationship between the tangible and the abstract.
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Press Release
Berggruen Gallery is proud to announce Blue Distance, an exhibition of new work by American artist Heather Day. This show marks her second solo exhibition with the gallery. Blue Distance will be on view from January 15 through March 5, 2026. The gallery will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, January 15, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm.
Heather Day’s abstract paintings explore memory, sensation, and landscape. Through a deep engagement with her lived environment in the Mojave Desert, Day translates its textures, sounds, and scents into bold, sweeping swathes of color and form. With her signature cut-and-stitch method, lush biomorphic forms emerge, enveloping one another in a rhythmic interplay of gesture and movement. An archive of memory and time, Day’s paintings reference the sensorial experiences that arise when one tunes into the natural world from a state of seclusion or solitude. Her meditative works suggest the generative expanses of sunsets and seas—bold hues shift before the viewer as if in a state of perpetual fluidity. Like the Southern California desert landscape Day draws from, her subtly attuned gradients reflect the fleeting and vivid states of light and color that emerge in the natural world.
This exhibition derives its title from a Rebecca Solnit essay in which the author explores the phenomenon of light appearing blue when viewed at a distance. Blue light, which sits at the far end of the spectrum, scatters through the atmosphere and dissipates the closer one moves toward it. This transient quality has come to symbolize that which we long for, and might experience in flashes, yet which remains just beyond attainment.
Drawing on art-historical methods such as Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stain technique and Sam Gilliam’s canonical drape paintings, Day relentlessly reimagines the possibilities of form and color as mechanisms to capture movement and gesture. Day first paints in fragments on the floor, then cuts, sews, and assembles the final compositions. Weaving together canvases with varied intrinsic histories, her compositions coalesce into a visual record of the ephemeral gestures that shaped their making and the fleeting experiences of sensation and memory that inform them.
Heather Day (b. 1989) received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2012 from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland, where she studied painting and art history. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group presentations in New York (2025), Paris (2024), San Francisco (2024), Art Basel Miami Beach (2023), Los Angeles (2025, 2022), Berlin (2024), Marfa (2023); among others. Day’s work has been featured in W Magazine, Art Forum, Artsy, New American Paintings and Galerie Magazine’s ‘Next Big Thing.’ Her paintings can be found in collections such as the Fort Wayne Museum of Art and the Macedonia Institute.
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