1053 Gallery is pleased to present Exit’s Tragedy, a three-person painting exhibition featuring new works by Nat Drake, Jörg Madlener and Wayne Toepp, organized by Lindsay Comstock and Monte Wilson. On view March 22 through April 27, 2025, with a public reception on Saturday, March 22, from 4 to 7pm, this exhibition marks the opening of a dynamic fourth season of programming from 1053 Gallery.

This exhibition celebrates the movement of brushstrokes and pigment in works that play with the boundaries of abstraction and representation, creating a narrative across the walls that is both disquieting and poignant. Though abstraction is nothing new, the curators are interested in the way the paintings can be seen together, the white box of the gallery once again a backdrop for a conversation in paint.

Exit’s Tragedy might refer to the discomfort and suffocation of being in an environment or a body from which there’s no escape: there’s the tragedy of not seeing something right in front of you, or paradoxically taking a narrow view; there are tragic figures and mystical landscapes which present the uncertainty and fragility of being. The atmosphere rendered in some of the works hold a tone that’s not unlike the opening of Samuel Beckett’s Malloy, one of the trilogy from which Toepp derives inspiration:

I’m in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got here. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got there thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don’t know how to work any more. That doesn’t matter apparently. What I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my good-byes, finish dying. 

Toepp’s work represents a profound exploration of the material and metaphysical possibilities of painting. His use of oil paint and layered surfaces invites viewers into an immersive experience of light, texture, and form, while the atmospheric qualities of his paintings evoke mystery, memory, and an ongoing search for meaning. Drawing from a deep well of art historical and literary influences, Toepp continues to push the boundaries of painting, creating works that are both visually compelling and intellectually provocative.

Madlener, an octogenarian and student of Otto Dix, first worked as a set designer in Germany in his twenties. He once met Beckett. His work is deeply philosophical and he articulates, in gestures that take turns obscuring and revealing the human face, a core problem he attempts to solve through his work: “Art is a rope that can raise one to spectacular heights—or else can serve as a hangman’s noose.” His painting, Head of Woman Bleeding, is a prime example of this, alluding to suffering yet presented in a landscape that’s green and inviting. 

Drake comes to painting with a background in composing music. The line work that’s so central to his paintings involve the viewer in a musicality of movement that carries a synesthetic quality. The viewer is given a chance to follow his trajectory—from cellist to solo singer to spoken word poet to painter—where figures, the bars of a music scale, and suggestions of flora seem to dance to a silent song.

Together the signs of hope in pops of color and the bleak, nihilistic landscapes present a notion that we’re on the brink of something, but what? There’s a sense of supplication in the figures, who’ve given themselves over to their fates; there’s a tragic beauty in the landscapes. The exhibition poses a choice point as well as a solemn understanding of what is present in the cycle of existence. The grimness, the disorientation, the metaphysical and existential questioning speak of the quiet emergency of this time.

Or, in the final words of Beckett’s trilogy, The Unnamable:

Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

Exhibition programming includes an artist talk and a Death Café to encourage community conversations and support around grief, life transitions and the concept of death.