Newchild is pleased to announce its inaugural participation in The Armory Show in New York, presenting Fading Pastoral, a duo exhibition featuring new works by Madeleine Bialke and James Owens in the fair’s Presents section.
Engaging the tradition of landscape painting as both a cultural artifact and a space of conceptual inquiry, Fading Pastoral brings together two distinct yet deeply resonant practices that reflect on the instability of our natural world in an era of ecological and psychological disquiet.
Working through luminous palettes and haunted forms, Madeleine Bialke and James Owens probe the entangled relationship between environment, memory, and myth. Their works engage a contemporary pastoralism—one that is less a retreat into nature than a meditation on its erosion, fragility, and transformation.
Bialke’s recent paintings, produced over the course of this year following a residency with Art for Change in Los Angeles and a two-day immersion in Sequoia National Park, respond directly to the aftermath of the January 2025 wildfires. Her compositions, bathed in toxic oranges, eerie pinks, and unstable lavenders, distort the Romantic sublime into a vision of post-apocalyptic disquiet. Nature here appears luminous yet destabilized—reverent and poisoned in equal measure—offering a vision of beauty under threat. What once evoked spiritual serenity is now rendered uncanny, an elegy for ecosystems slipping beyond repair.
In contrast, Owens’ practice turns inward, exploring landscape not as external terrain but as a psychological and symbolic interior. His paintings oscillate between figuration and abstraction, layering untamed flora, spectral figures, and fractured spaces to conjure a dreamlike wilderness. Infused with mythological and personal symbolism, his canvases suggest landscapes of longing, resistance, and reimagination—refuges where fragments of memory and cultural detritus coalesce into ambiguous, atmospheric visions.
Together, Bialke and Owens offer a compelling dialogue on the evolving condition of the pastoral. Rather than presenting landscape as a static or idealized genre, they treat it as a site of cultural memory and environmental reckoning—one shaped by collective anxieties and shifting ecologies. Fading Pastoral is not merely a reflection on what has been lost, but an invitation to consider what remains: a fragile terrain of possibility, imagination, and renewal.
