Beneath The Surface: Alexis Granwell and Greg Dzurita at Field of Play
This article has been republished from White Hot Magazine. Read the original here.
From left: Greg Dzurita, I Think I Let Go, (2024). Alexis Granwell, Spiraling Return (2024). Granwell, Weather Watching (2024). Photographed by Masaki Hori, courtesy of Field of Play.
Some exhibitions feel like staring into a dark night sky—the longer we sit to let our eyes adjust, the more stars emerge. In Beneath the Surface, curated by Yulia Topchiy at Field of Play in Gowanus, Brooklyn, artists Alexis Granwell and Greg Dzurita offer this kind of slow unfolding.
It starts at the surface. Granwell sculpts with paper pulp, a mixture of water and plant fibers, which is shaped by hand and then left to dry. It’s a slow process, requiring the water to evaporate; in this way, time itself becomes a material. What’s left behind hardens into form, whether wrapped around a steel armature or molded to cast another object, as in Old Wind (2023). Echoing the textures of skin, fossils, and organic reliefs, the surfaces are wrinkled like sediment, folded like leathered skin. Unmistakably, the resulting works are a form of remains—deepening the tension between presence and absence, and elevating the beauty of impermanence.
Foreground: Alexis Granwell, Weather Watching (2024). Background, from left: Greg Dzurita Untitled 91 (2024). Alexis Granwell, Old Wind (2023). Photographed by Masaki Hori, courtesy of Field of Play.
Weather Watching (2024) brings this sensibility into sharper focus. Its form suggests a reliquary or funerary vessel—at first, I felt met by a symbol of my own mortality. But then again, what is the experience of art if not a confrontation with one's own mind? I sensed a palpable grief, yes; but also a playfulness, an exaltation of ephemeral materials. It’s a celebration within life’s constraints—especially when faced with what appears, at first, impermanent.
Though steadily perched on pedestals or mounted upon walls, Granwell’s works convey movement. Spiraling Return (2024), in particular, seems to resist gravity. Two curved wings of organic improvisation twist and pivot on a single point of contact with a steel frame. While they appear weighty, suggesting the solidity of ceramics, the forms are deceptively as light as paper. Athletic and flexible, I'm reminded of Martha Graham’s dancers.
The lineage of post-minimalism and Arte Povera are evident within Granwell's body of work. They call to mind Eva Hesse’s tactile forms, the material experimentation and exuberance of the ’60s and ’70s. Like these creative ancestors, the work is deeply felt, and relish in a rejection of traditional sculptural materials like marble or stone. Like Hesse, these forms are self-contradictory, muscular and even rebellious—but also tender. Granwell crafts monuments to a life, or better yet, the afterimage of a feeling.
Dzurita's Untitled 91 and Old Wind glimpsed through Granwell's Spiraling Return. Photographed by Masaki Hori, courtesy of Field of Play.
Across the room, through the curved ribbons of Spiraling Return, I see Greg Dzurita's painted works. They also engage with the material constraints of the body, infused with a serious sense of play. Dzurita constructs his surfaces from scratch, layering pieces of wood onto standard stretcher bars to create custom armatures that underline the overall shape. Once wrapped in canvas, the painting’s surface becomes deliberately uneven, sometimes warped, and playfully undulates across unconventional edges. Resisting normative rectangular dimensions, the works reach out into the viewer’s space, breaking the fourth wall. Often, there’s a tension at the edge, a curve where you might expect a corner.
At the center of Dzurita's Untitled 91 (2024), a shape reminiscent of a Fibonacci spiral twirls towards a calculated center. A starburst of white gleams against a ground of deep violet with sandy texture. Throughout Dzurita’s body of work, geometric motifs like circles, spirals and cubes are rendered both in delicate outline and with illusionistic depth, articulating the tension between tangible objects and their Platonic ideals.
In I Think I Let Go (2024), the circle motif appears as a painted orb alongside thin outlines of a cube’s corners, paired with flat planes of color to signal its dimensionality. These lines extend beyond its initial borders, suggest one-point perspective and drawing the viewer's eye back into the distance. Meanwhile, gradients shift in contradictory directions, disrupting any unified spatial logic. Adjacent to these illusionistic corners, the wooden armature beneath the canvas occasionally breaks the surface—a tangible bump that interrupts the pictorial space and reminds us of the work’s physicality.
Detail of Dzurita's The Only Echo.
Dzurita’s process is shaped by improvisation and visualization. In turn, the paintings feel like forms glimpsed in the mind’s eye and translated from intuition into material. Listening to jazz while working, Dzurita seeks flow states that dissolve time, once sharing that geometry is his closest visual approximation to music. It echoes Wassily Kandinsky’s approach: painting as if composing a score. The work seems to emerge from this very psychic space—and invites the viewer to dwell there as well.
Dzurita’s distinct color-world is deeply grounded in place. In 2024, he moved into his grandmother’s former home in Queens, originally purchased in the 1940s. Over time, he noticed the perennials from her garden flowering in waves: tulips, irises, and then violets—each cohort blooming and dying, careful not to overstep the others. When the petals began falling, Dzurita started collecting them, transforming this detritus into pigment. While not every hue is foraged, it’s clear the plants live on within these paintings. Like perennials themselves, the works reflect the cyclical nature of life, its continuity, and how energy flows through each subsequent generation.
Granwell's Old Wind and Dzurita's The Only Echo (2025). Photographed by Masaki Hori, courtesy of Field of Play.
Beneath the Surface reveals itself deliberately over time, rewarding those who linger. Granwell’s sculptures fossilize the emotional residue of a life lived, while Dzurita’s paintings dissolve the perceptible line between worlds, inviting reflection on what ultimately endures. Together, their work anchors us in material even as it gestures toward something beyond.
The dialogue between these artists prompts profound introspection. I was moved by the way the show led me inward—toward a feeling beyond the limits of language. These works are, without question, best encountered in person.
Beneath the Surface is on view through August 10th, 2025 at Field of Play Gallery in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
