Carolyn Oberst & Eden Seifu
March 14th - May 3rd, 2025
Storage
52 Walker Street
4th Floor
Tribeca, New York 10013
Storage is pleased to present A New Sacred, a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Carolyn Oberst (b. 1946) and Eden Seifu (b. 1996). Continuing the gallery’s focus on intergenerational dialogues, this iteration highlights two women who have reimagined the possibilities of Christian imagery, iconography, and notions of power. The show is on view from March 14 through May 3, 2025.
Since the 2nd century, artists have perpetually reinvented ways to display biblical imagery. The works in this exhibition are not a translation of text to image, but one in which universally-known hallmarks of Christianity are employed by artists to craft contemporary tableaus – more akin to the 19th century Symbolists’ visual metaphors. From different perspectives and with different intent, these two self-taught painters have harnessed this tradition to make work that is entrenched with political history.
Dismayed by environmental degradation, Carolyn Oberst created the pieces in The Crosses We Bear from 1990 to 1994. Ethnically Jewish and secular, Oberst has said of the series, “I felt that separate from the religious association, the cross shape would connote both a sign of pain and suffering as well as a call to action.” Deforestation, oil spills, and endangered flora and fauna are rendered in careful detail. Burning the Tree of Life calls to mind the blazing bush that God used to speak to Moses, though the hills licked with flames in the background point to an uncontained wildfire. In Endangered Birds, Oberst imagines a flock of different tropical avians gathered harmoniously in the branches of a tree. “When looking for which species to depict, I tried to find examples that were so common looking one would not suspect they were endangered.”
Eden Seifu’s singular aesthetic gathers and blends visual identities: from El Greco’s loose, elongated limbs to the characters of commedia dell'arte. Consistent throughout her practice is a sense of the sublime and sacred, often accompanied by Ethiopian Christian religious markers. A young angel is the focus of Two-Headed Cherub. Surrounded by sinewy wings, one face looks outward in awe while the other is filled with tears, like the iconic comedy and tragedy masks metonymous of the performing arts. In The Angel of Pilgrimage, the figure stands calmly in a swirling, abstract space. The surrounding evokes clouds with its airy brushstrokes but, instead of pure white, the artist has crafted a splendor of pastels. These two pieces recall the straightforward plane of pre-Giotto religious iconography, while other works like Acrobat warp the viewpoint in a way that echoes the covers of science fiction and fantasy pulp novels. Like the development of perspective during the Florentine Renaissance, her magpie approach to visual culture well represents the hyperspeed of our time.