WHY LANDSCAPES, WHY NOW, ON "LOVELY DAY"
April 11, 2026
There’s a quiet risk in showing landscape right now.
It can be mistaken for retreat, for being apolitical, decorative, or even nostalgic. The work in Lovely Day, opening April 9 at Amy Kaslow Gallery, resists that reading, exhibiting landscapes of great beauty and depth, places we are drawn to enter, places that hold memory, atmosphere, and sometimes loss.
Distinguishing this exhibition is its timing. To look at land today is to think about what is changing, what is disappearing. Jaroslav Leonets is essential to the conversation. Based in Kyiv, this leading Ukrainian talent comes from a terrain that has never been neutral.
Distinguishing this exhibition is its timing. To look at land today is to think about what is changing, what is disappearing. Jaroslav Leonets is essential to the conversation. Based in Kyiv, this leading Ukrainian talent comes from a terrain that has never been neutral.
Leonets paints from a position both intimate and unstable. His landscapes are grounded in observation – fields, rivers, expanses of sky – but they carry the weight of what it means to depict a place that may no longer exist in the same way. The paintings are not illustrations of war. They are records of presence. They insist, quietly, that this land was once lived in, known, and loved.
To look at them is to feel a shift: from landscape as scenery to landscape as witness.
Lizzie Butler approaches the earth through sensation. Her paintings often dissolve the horizon line, allowing color and light to take precedence over structure. The result is less about a specific place and more about the experience of being in one: the way sky expands, the way water holds light, the way stillness feels physical. Her precision and exquisite color sense lure us.
If Leonets anchors the exhibition in reverence and referral, Butler opens it into the expanse of land, sea, and sky.
Together, they show the push and pull between holding onto a place and letting ourselves move within it.
There’s something else happening here, too – something quieter. The exhibition asks what it means to pay attention. Not in a grand sense, but in a sustained one. To look at a field long enough to notice its color shifts. To sit with a painting until it stops being an image and starts becoming an environment.
In that way, Lovely Day is less about landscape as a genre and more about landscape as a practice of looking again and again.
And that feels urgent now; not because it offers escape, but because it insists on presence.