I-20 is pleased to present Karen Heagle’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, a new series of acrylic and mixed-media paintings on paper.

In these works Heagle references Dutch and Flemish genre and still life painting, as well as the work of the French painter Jean-Baptise-Siméon Chardin. Mimicking the tradition of vanitas still lifes, Heagle incorporates fish, game and kitchen ephemera in her own work to allude to ideas of vanity and mortality with subtle suggestions of the erotic.

In Rabbit, Copper Pot and Lava Lamp, the inclusion of the artist’s lava lamp adds an element of parody to the work – akin to a more queer rendition of Chardin. The painting Let Nature Take Its Course and Hope It Passes serves as the show’s title and is a scene in the artist’s home, incorporating elements from both reality and imagination in an incongruous, yet intuitive way. One of the objects is the artist’s taxidermy deer head; another is a 17th-century sculpture of two women wrestling that is owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Landscape works take on more naturalist allegories of desire, the pursuit of passions, the inevitable cycles of life and its impermanence. These themes are clearly reflected in Weedburner, which depicts an isolated barrow of fiery brush in a field. Inexperienced / Insatiable, one of the exhibition’s larger works, features a prowling tiger wading in water at night under a moon.

Self-portrait in Armor and Two Vultures take on human nature. The artist covers her humanness through disguise while the two vultures are curiously nurturing rather than predatory.

Karen Heagle was born in Tomah, Wisconsin in 1967. She was was educated at the University of Wisconsin and received her MFA at the Pratt Institute in New York. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Recent group shows include Vivid, curated by Janet Phelps, Schroeder, Romero and Shredder Gallery, New York; Lush Life 3: First Bird (A Few Butterflies), the Lower East Side show based on a Richard Price novel that was curated by Franklin Evans and Omar Lopez-Chahoud, Invisible Exports, New York; and BAM 2010 Next Wave, curated by Dan Cameron, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Her work appeared in the Men Show, curated by Ellen Altfest, at I-20 in 2006; and Panic Room at the Deste Foundation Centre for Contemporary Art, Athens, Greece. Heagle has been reviewed in publications such as the The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America and The New Yorker. Her works are in numerous collections. These include the Saatchi Gallery, London, and the Judith Rothschild Contemporary Drawing Collection at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.