Rhett Baruch Gallery is pleased to announce Mysterious Bodies, a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Samantha McCurdy (Los Angeles) and Bonnie Morano (New York). The exhibition opens with a public reception on Thursday, May 15th from 5:00–8:00 PM at Rhett Baruch Gallery, located at 6057 Melrose Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038, and will be on view through June 21, 2025. Both artists will be present at the opening reception.

Through materially distinct yet thematically resonant practices, both artists interrogate the surface of the painting as a site of revelation, concealment, and transformation. Their works propose the body not merely as form, but as space—a vessel through which energy, symbolism, and spiritual resonance emerge.

Samantha McCurdy approaches the painted surface as both skin and container. Her sculptural paintings begin with expertly crafted wooden substrates, custom armatures constructed through over a decade of refined carpentry. These structures are tightly wrapped in stretchable fabric, which clings to the geometric and organic forms hidden beneath, subtly revealing the contours of an internal presence. Over this base, McCurdy applies multiple layers of paint, sanding each coat with precision. The result is an exceptionally smooth, plastic-like finish that both heightens the illusion of manufactured perfection and reinforces the tension between objecthood and intimacy. These taut, luminous surfaces evoke the aesthetics of industrial design while maintaining the quiet presence of the handmade. Her forms, restrained yet suggestive, animate the threshold between revelation and secrecy, exterior and interior.

Bonnie Morano, by contrast, navigates abstraction through a language of symmetry, repetition, and symbolic construction. Her compositions are built from a personal vocabulary of geometric and organic forms, elements she arranges with architectural precision and meditative intent. These formal strategies create visual rhythms that echo ritual, reflection, and the metaphysical. Morano’s color palette, drawn from the material culture of precious metals, gemstones, and textiles, imbues the work with a heightened sense of value and reverence. Her paintings are simultaneously structured and ecstatic, inviting viewers into symbolic worlds that pulse with hidden meaning. Beneath their hard edges and calculated balance lies a deep connection to the spiritual, a quiet assertion of painting as a space of order, mystery, and transformation.

Though their processes diverge, with McCurdy working through physical tension and concealment and Morano through visual codes and compositional structure, both artists treat the surface as a site of energetic resonance. They investigate the thresholds between body and spirit, visibility and opacity, control and emotion. Together in Mysterious Bodies, McCurdy and Morano establish a dynamic conversation. Their works insist that the body is not merely a form to be seen, but a field in which energy, devotion, and meaning are shaped, and where the material world meets something just beyond our grasp.