Madeleine Bialke’s paintings are mostly without a person. It is the trees with rounded, softened flora on their branches that are the actors in her artworks. Motionless in dream-like scenarios, the artist generates emotion through the glowing colors that she applies on her canvases. And although the scenarios look still, they are about recognizing how one can stand to all the change that is happening.

Bialke’s first solo exhibition in the UK was titled “Long Summer”, and fourteen paintings that the artist created during the pandemic’s first summer were exhibited. The artist was recovering from Lyme disease while staying at her family’s cabin in the Adirondack Mountains and painting a series of artworks. Questioning climate change and our collective fate related to it, she was inspired by how nature was still standing tall under its irrepressible effects.

Her latest solo exhibition “Nine Lives” exhibits nine paintings that are inspired by the trees of Five Ponds Wilderness Area, an old-growth forest in the Adirondack Mountains. Each painting represents the nine planets in our solar system through their color palette. The grounded trees juxtapose with their unearthly bodies, while the haziness of the skies suggests the end of the world. It is both a familiar and an untrustworthy feeling on Bialke’s canvases.

While the colors of Bialke’s paintings suggest all the dramatic realities of today, the calmness of her trees comes into prominence in the first glimpse. With orange shades that are resembling fires and brown tones that are corresponding to pollution, her compositions of nature leave behind a sense of atmosphere that is peaceful in an unexpected way.

Check out Madeleine Bialke’s Instagram @mbialkey and her website to discover more about the artist and her paintings. Don’t forget to share your views with us in our comment section below!

About Madeleine Bialke

Madeleine Bialke is an American painter, who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating with a BFA in Studio Art from the Plattsburgh State University of New York, the artist received her MFA in Painting at Boston University, Massachusetts. She has been exhibiting her artworks in several gallery spaces since 2016, including solo exhibitions at Harper’s Books in New York, Deanna Evans Projects in New York, Huxley-Parlour Gallery in London, UK, and Steve Turner Gallery in Los Angeles. Awarded with the John Walker MFA Painting and Sculpture Award, the artist lists German-American painter Albert Bierstadt and American adventurer and painter George Catlin as the inspirations behind her landscape paintings.

Madeleine Bialke is represented by Newchild Gallery in Antwerp, Belgium, where her upcoming solo exhibition will take place in December 2022.