Jan Dickey

Summer Creature presents a new body of work by Brooklyn-based painter Jan Dickey, which includes pieces created during his recent two-month residency at TUR telpa in Rīga, Latvia, alongside large-scale paintings made in his Art Cake studio. In Rīga, Dickey experimented with traditional dyes native to Latvia and egg tempera on paper, tracing ephemeral sunlight patterns across his studio and capturing the shifting qualities of light as summer moved into autumn.

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A simple wooden stool, used nightly by the building’s security guards, became a compositional anchor in the afternoon. Its shadow and presence helped shape abstract forms that emerge from the interplay of light, earth-based materials, and absorbent surfaces.

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Alongside these works on paper, the exhibition features paintings executed at Art Cake on cloth using distemper, tempera, casein, acrylic, natural dyes, and oil. Across all works, Dickey explores superposition as a material phenomenon, in which higher-dimensional forms collapse onto a two-dimensional surface, layering in ways that appear inextricable even to the most practiced eye. Colorants, binders, translucency, and texture form an “accretion disc,” wherein four-dimensional reality accumulates on the surface-turned event horizon, preserving moments that compress into a nearly flat and irreversible record. Rather than simplifying or losing information through abstraction, the works seem to reveal more and more with each inspection.

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At the heart of Summer Creature is the search for a pictorial figure that emerges from the layered light shapes and accumulating material. Across paper and cloth, Dickey seeks a sense of animation, a vitality that makes each painting feel like a living entity. The surfaces are not just records of process but bodies in themselves—creatures that breathe through color, texture, and light. The “Summer” in the title gestures toward a post-nostalgic memory: instead of sentimentally longing for a past summer, Dickey is processing it materially and perceptually, creating something that both acknowledges loss and manifests presence. Each composition becomes a pulsing hybrid of memory, material, and sensation, where the warmth and fleeting brilliance of summer are sedimented into a presence that is both fragile and alive.

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Summer Creature reveals how layered surfaces can hold both the record of process and the suggestion of higher-dimensional forms, deepening our sense that we exist as precariously self-contained entities within a material reality shaped by collapse, preservation, and the visible traces of what has passed.