Woman on a Balcony | Sarah Avolio, Rowan Howe, Florence Reekie

April 11 – May 3, 2025

 Woman on a Balcony features new works by three emerging figurative painters, Sarah Avolio, Rowan Howe, and Florence Reekie, all of whom create enigmatic scenes of domestic life through unconventional compositions. The exhibition takes its title from a fragment of a Roman fresco in the collection of the Getty Villa, featuring a lone woman standing on a balcony. The rest of the fresco has been lost to history, but this piece remains, preserving the woman but not her original context. Like the jagged edges of this fragment, the borders of a canvas can isolate an image from its larger context, a tactic employed by all three artists on view.

Sarah Avolio’s work recalls the finesse of traditional oil painting, yet her subjects become estranged and abstracted by her dramatically cropped compositions. The young women in Rowan Howe’s highly detailed works are shown up close or at unconventional angles, creating ambiguous scenes of intimacy and alienation. The viewer, immersed in these private moments, can only guess at the narrative surrounding them. Florence Reekie paints on both cotton supports and on Moiré silk, allowing the texture of the fabric to ground the painted composition.  Her works evoke the detritus of femininity and center the details of daily life.

Sarah Avolio (b. 2003, Toronto, ON) lives and works in Toronto, ON. Working primarily in oil paint, she uses traditional techniques to conjure a softened view of reality, creating affective and enigmatic scenes of the everyday. Avolio’s work closely analyzes signifiers of idealized femininity and purity to produce surreal spaces that are suffused with intimacy, softness, and repose.

She is currently completing her BFA in Drawing and Painting at OCAD University (Toronto, ON), with an expected graduation of 2025.

Rowan Howe (b. 1997, Baltimore, MD) is a painter whose work explores sexual performance, memory, and the absurdity of seduction through the collage of landscape, found imagery, and the female nude. Her practice straddles the line between observer and observed, creating ambiguous spaces where figures exist between adolescence and womanhood. 

Howe lives and works in Austin, TX. She holds an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Texas at Austin and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

Florence Reekie lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is a figurative oil painter whose work engages with themes of perception, iconography, and coding within compositions, while also experimenting with the materiality of paint. Reekie’s paintings investigate societal relationships with clothing and fabric, using drapery not merely as staging but as a central element for exploring identity, vanity, and the ways we construct and present ourselves. Through depictions of crumpled laundry and intricate textiles, she reveals the quiet power of the overlooked, drawing attention to the armors and beauty ‘secrets’ we use to shape personal and collective identity.

Reekie had her first solo exhibition 'Sumptuary Laws’ with MAMA (London, UK) in 2023 and has exhibited at Annely Juda (London, UK), Aberdeen Art Gallery (Aberdeen, UK), and in MEGA Art Fair (Milan, Italy), among others. Her work has been published in Art Quarterly (Spring 2022) and featured on ArtBasel.com (2024). She was the recipient of the Art Fund ‘Museum of the Year’ Aberdeen Art Gallery Micro Commission in 2021.