BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
ANDREA JOYCE HEIMER, AUTUMN WALLACE, DIANNA SETTLES, EMILY YONG BECK, JOHANNA SEIDEL, KASIA FUDAKOWSKI, KATJA FARIN, KRZYSZTOF STRZELECKI, LUCY LUCKOVICH, REEHA LIM + RYAN KO, TRAVIS BOYER, + WENDY WHITE
JULY 10 - AUGUST 15, 2025
GAA NEW YORK
Gaa is pleased to present Behind Closed Doors, a group exhibition that explores the open-ended invitation extended through the privacy of interior spaces. Including works by Andrea Joyce Heimer, Autumn Wallace, Dianna Settles, Emily Yong Beck, Johanna Seidel, Kasia Fudakowski, Katja Farin, Krzysztof Strzelecki, Lucy Luckovich, Reeha Lim + Ryan Ko, Travis Boyer, and Wendy White, Behind Closed Doors encourages the discovery and embrace of moments of peace and play, pain and pleasure, and all the fleeting feelings in between.
Working across media, these artists incorporate components ranging from more conventional materials such as oil and acrylic paints or ceramic clay, to nontraditional forms of assemblage and sculpture composed of fabric, sequins, and beads, as well as industrial steel and hand-blown glass. Through visceral depictions and abstracted interpretations of figures in states of repose, reflection, delirium, or delight, the works in Behind Closed Doors offer space for both individual inquiry and collective contemplation on the human inclination to lower defenses and invite vulnerability when external observations and pressures waver and drift out the window.
Andrea Joyce Heimer (b. 1981, Great Falls, Montana, USA) is an artist whose painting and drawing practice investigates the subject of loneliness—largely informed by autobiographical stories such as her own adoption—to examine how humans experience feeling alone and its connection to how and why we make art. Heimer’s paintings evoke narratives where landscapes and interiors are organized into distinct rows, each portraying a different stage in the lives of her characters. Throughout her work, Heimer demonstrates an interest in origins. Her work contains a complex and imaginative use of symbolic figures referencing the Garden of Eden and Greek mythology, while also creating and recording her own history and personal mythologies.
Heimer lives and works in Ferndale, Washington. Heimer received her MFA from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire and has held teaching appointments at Oregon College of Art and Craft, Portland, OR; Western Washington University, Bellingham, WA; and Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Gaa, New York, NY; Museum of Arts + Culture, Spokane, WA; Nino Mier Gallery, Half Gallery, and The Good Luck Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY; Parlor Gallery, Asbury Park, NJ; Maxwell Colette Gallery, Chicago, IL; Nino Mier Gallery, Marfa, TX; Linda Hodges Gallery, Seattle, WA; Whatcom Museum, Bellingham, WA; idrawalot Collective, Berlin, Germany; and The Centre of International Contemporary Art Vancouver, BC, Canada, among others. Additionally her work has be included in group exhibitions at Nino Mier Gallery, Half Gallery, and Edlin Gallery, in New York, NY; The Museum of Craft and Design, San Fransisco, CA; Bemis Center, Omaha, NE, 12.26 Gallery, Dallas, TX; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Nino Mier Gallery, Brussels, Belgium; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark. Her work has been covered in outlets including Artforum, Art in America, Huffington Post, New York Times, The New Yorker, New American Paintings, and The Wall Street Journal.
Autumn Wallace (b. 1996, Philadelphia, PA) is a visual artist who works across media to create paintings and sculptures that examine human sexuality, gender, and the black femme experience. Influenced by early 90’s cartoons, Byzantine aesthetics, Baroque Style, and what Wallace describes as “low-quality adult materials”, Wallace’s work generates a sense of fluidity whereby figures defy spatial, social, physical, emotional, and psychological boundaries.
Wallace is a graduate of the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Wallace’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions and presentations at Josh Lilley, London, UK; The Armory Show, Gaa, New York, NY; Gaa, Cologne, Germany; Gaa, Provincetown, MA; the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; Portside Art Parlor, Philadelphia, PA; HOUSE Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; and Stella Elkins Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. Wallace’s work has also been featured in group exhibitions at San Francisco Arts Commission, San Francisco, CA; Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, CA; Clearing, Brooklyn, NY; Gaa, Provincetown, MA; Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai; Margot Samel, New York, NY; and the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM), Provincetown, MA, among others. Wallace is the recipient of numerous fellowships, including residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), North Adams, MA; the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; and Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY. In 2021, Wallace’s work was acquired by the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Dianna Settles (b. 1989, Los Alamitos, California) examines what it is to exist as part of a collective, portraying how culture, politics, and ideologies intertwine in community. Forms are arranged symbolically in poetic compositions, placing portraits of friends into potent moments in time. Bathhouses, prisons, and gathering places are depicted in conversation, while blooming patterns, details, and colors are woven into the scenes. Settles draws from Western tradition, as well as from the art history of her father’s native Vietnam, mindfully synthesizing multiple lineages while recontextualizing marginalized bodies.
Settles received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Previous solo exhibitions include Enemy of the Century at MARCH, New York, NY; A Thousand Paths Bloom at Galerie Marguo, Paris, France. A Life Worth Living Would Be A Life Worth Living at MARCH, New York, NY; and Olly Olly Oxen Free at Institute 193, Lexington, KY. Settles has exhibited at The Carnegie, Covington, KY; The High Museum, Atlanta, GA; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; Casa Marguo, Menorca, Spain; and the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA; among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the ICA Miami, Miami, FL; X Museum, Beijing, China; Le Consortium, Dijon, France; and the Longlati Foundation, Hong Kong, China. As the inaugural artist of Living Walls’ international exchange program, Settles completed an 180 foot-long mural titled: To Our Friends / Á Nos Amis in Paris, France in July of 2019. She has also completed murals in Atlanta, GA; Oakland, CA; and Pittsburgh, PA. Settles was a finalist for the 2019 Forward Arts Foundation Edge Award, and a receipient of the Atlanta Contemporary Studio Artist Program. From 2016 to 2024, Settles co-led Hi-Lo Press and Gallery, a collective exhibition space and publisher in Atlanta, GA.
Emily Yong Beck (b. 1999, Daegu, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary ceramic artist who received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute in 2021. Yong Beck’s work will be featured in an upcoming exhibition at the Asia Society, Houston, TX. Yong Beck has been featured in solo exhibitions at Gaa, New York, NY, Provincetown, MA, and Cologne, Germany; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; The Frozen Fountain Meguro, Tokyo, Japan; and New Image Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA among others. Yong Beck has been featured in group shows at Gaa, New York, NY; Allouche Benias, Athens, Greece; Korean Cultural Center of Chicago, IL; Lefebvre & Fils, Paris, France; Moosey Gallery, London, UK; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, CA among others.
Johanna Seidel (b. 1993, Sebnitz, Germany) is a visual artist based in Dresden, Germany, whose vivid paintings primarily address the subject of nature. Seidel approaches different perceived realities through a lyrical visual language involving symbols from history, mythology, and dreams. Blending dreams and reality allows Seidel to create her own world on the canvas. From a palette in which shades of violet, pink, orange, and green play an important role, Seidel develops stories and still images that exist in an atmospheric space, condensing memories and the imagined into abstract moments that become accessible.
Seidel received her MFA at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions have been held at Gaa, New York, NY; CLC Gallery Venture, Beijing, China; SheBam!, Leipzig, Germany; Artistellar Gallery, London, UK; Kunstverein Meissen, Meissen, Germany; and Galerie Mellies, Detmold, Germany. Seidel’s work has been included in group exhibitions at numerous galleries and institutions including Gaa, New York, NY and Cologne, Germany; Museum Gunzenhauser, Chemnitz, Germany; Pictorum Gallery and Soho Revue in London, UK; C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts, Alte Feuerwache Loschwitz, LaSuV, Galerie Stephanie Kelly, Raum für zeitgenössische Kuns, and Zentralwerk in Dresden, Germany; and Phyllis Johnson, Halle14, Alte Spinnerei and Zuständige Behörde in Leipzig, Germany.
Kasia Fudakowski b. 1985) is a visual artist whose diverse and playful practice, which includes sculpture, film, performance, and writing, explores social riddles through material encounters, surreal logic and comic theory. Often referring to the allure and danger of binary categorisation and the subsequent absurdity that it unfolds in our political and social climate, her work reveals the discrepancies amongst cultural norms. Where she employs comic mechanisms, the tragic is never far behind, so that her work often hovers between the horrific and the comic. Frequently the target of her own attacks, she explores her own role as an artist and the stereotype thereof with both a seriousness and irreverence typical of her approach.
Fudakowski studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University, graduating in 2006 before moving to Berlin. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the 25th Biennial in Gabrovo, Bulgaria; Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany; Palazzo Grassi – Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany; LOKremise – Kunstmuseum, St.Gallen, Switzerland; Deutsches Hygiene Museum, Dresden, Germany; 15th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey; SALTS, Basel, Switzerland; Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany; Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany; Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Italy; 1646, The Hague, Futura Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague; Max Pechstein Museum, Zwickau, Germany; GAK Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany. Fudakowski lives and works in Berlin.
Katja Farin (b. 1996, Los Angeles, CA) works in figurative painting depicting the interactions between the subconscious and reality. The relationship between figures is uncertain; the everyday life of sitting at coffee shops, wandering in backyard gardens, answering boring phone calls becomes the backdrop for the internal dialogue with the self that contemplates traumas, coping mechanisms, dreams and distortions. The works are dream spaces that allow the viewer to peek into the interior worlds of the figures, their relationships with the self and others. Bright colors, glowing hands and distorted bodies create the dreamlike dysphoric space that these androgynous figures embody.
Farin received a BA in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018 and is a candidate for an MFA degree from the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Selected solo exhibitions have been held at Gaa, New York, NY; Friends Indeed, San Francisco, CA; Era Gallery, Milan; Lubov, New York, NY; and in lieu, Los Angeles, CA. Their art has been included in group exhibitions at Pace Gallery, Hong Kong, China; Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Beers, London; Wilding Cran, Los Angeles, CA; and Nicodim, Los Angeles, CA. The artist lives and works in London, UK.
Krzysztof Strzelecki (b. 1993, Świdnica, Poland) works across a variety of media with a particular focus on ceramic vessels that explore homoeroticism and human sexuality. Growing up isolated and homosexual in rural Poland, the scenes depicted in Strzelecki’s ‘Cruising Fantasies’ emerge from the longing for an erotic and romantic escape. Surfing the web, browsing apps, and his own personal archive of photography, the artist preserves these images of men on his captivating vessels. In an array of vivid colors and shapes, at times evoking cactus, waves, fruit, or even apartment buildings, Strzelecki creates his own world where his subjects inhabit their environments freely and unselfconsciously.
Strzelecki earned his BFA in photography from the University of the Arts London, Camberwell, UK. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA/New York, NY and Taymour Grahne Projects, London, UK. He has exhibited in group exhibitions at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles/New York; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA; Kasmin, New York, NY; Gaa, New York, NY/Provincetown, MA; and BEERS, London, UK among others. In 2023 Strzelecki presented sculptures at the British Ceramics Biennial, in Stoke-on-Trent, UK. His sculpture Olympia (2020) was acquired by the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) permanent collection. Strzelecki lives and works between Poland and London, UK.
Lucy Luckovich (b. 2001, Atlanta, Georgia, USA) is a painter whose work explores the complexities of femininity, objectification, virginity, and oppression. She portrays these topics through the juxtaposition of beauty and elegance with darkness and fear, and in doing so she reveals the emotional terrain of feminine identity. Within these observations, she wrestles with the conflicting emotions of embracing her identity and feeling resentment towards it. Luckovich lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where she is an MFA candidate at Rhode Island School of Design.
Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Marietta Cob Museum of Art, Marietta, GA and Cat Eye Creative, Atlanta, GA. Luckovich has been included in group exhibitions at Gaa, New York, NY; Guerrero Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Tchotchke Gallery, New York, NY; Shelter Gallery, New York, NY; Harsh Collective, New York, NY; 378 Gallery, Atlanta, GA; Cat Eye Creative, Atlanta, GA; and Swan Coach House Gallery, Atlanta, GA among others.
Reeha Lim (b. 1994, China) examines belonging and sensory recall across domestic thresholds, exploring ambiguities and dichotomies inherent to what is taken for granted. Self-portrait yet non-self-portrait, her works function as vessels for a transversal sensorium. Through her ghost-like, double-sided painting technique, Lim reinforces images and ideas by blurring thresholds across space, thus creating impressions that blend physicality and metaphysicality.
Lim earned her BFA from Hong-ik University in South Korea in 2021 and was subsequently awarded the Fulbright scholarship, completing her MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2024. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Back and Front, Passageway Gallery, MI, USA, 2023; Ul-Lung-Ddung-Ddang, TYA Gallery, Seoul, South Korea, 2022; and REEHA & KYUNGSEO, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France, 2016. Lim has been selected for artist residencies at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2017, and has been chosen to be featured in the New American Paintings Midwest Issue.
Ryan Ko (b. 1994) is a Korean American artist with a studio practice based in Arizona. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Arizona State University, and MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work explores the concepts of memory, absence, and the bond and inherent distance between family members and the deceased. Through the integration and reimagining of familial archival images, his work is inquisitive in nature; Can we form memories with those that are already gone, and can we find them in places they have never been?
Travis Boyer (b. 1979 in Fort Worth, TX) lives and works in New York, NY. Boyer’s works explore how surfaces accrue meaning, inviting reflection on ornament, cultural memory, and queer embodiment. Velvet is both medium and metaphor in Boyer’s work. As a substrate, it carries a unique material history: once a fabric of aristocratic luxury, later a marker of bourgeois domesticity and, by the 1970s, a fabric of countercultural kitsch. Painting on both the reverse and front sides of the fabric, Boyer allows pigments to bleed through or be pressed in. Boyer’s paintings refuse to be flattened; as the velvet’s pile refracts light, the images emerge and recede, shimmer and dissolve. His surfaces are not passive grounds but performative, unstable, and assertive.
Boyer graduated with an MFA from Bard College, NY in 2022. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions in several galleries and art centers in America and Europe including Noon Projects, Los Angeles,CA; Signal Gallery, New York,NY; False Flag, New York, NY; Hello Project Gallery, Houston, TX; Johannes Vogt Gallery, New York, NY; Studio 17, Stavanger, Norway; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, Netherlands. In 2021, he took part in the Texas Biennal. He had residencies at Nesflaten Skule, Suldal, Norway, 2015; and at the Shandaken Project, Shandaken, New York, NY among others. His works are in the collection of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; and Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; all in the USA.
Wendy White (b. 1971, Deep River, CT) is based in New York City. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Gaa, Provincetown and New York; Galerie Lange + Pult, Zürich; Kaikai Kiki, Tokyo; Leo Koenig Inc., New York; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; COUNTY, Palm Beach; Maruani Noirhomme, Brussels; VAN HORN, Düsseldorf; Denny Dimin Gallery, New York; David Castillo, Miami; Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago; Galerie Jérôme Pauchant, Paris; Sherrick & Paul, Nashville; and Galeria Moriarty, Madrid.
White’s work was the subject of a solo museum exhibition in 2021 entitled Low Pressure at Museum Goch, Germany. She was recently included in Resistance Training: Arts, Sports, and Civil Rights at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI. Other institutional group exhibitions include The World’s Game: Fútbol and Contemporary Art at Perez Art Museum in Miami, FL; Fútbol: The Beautiful Game at LACMA in Los Angeles, CA; Full of Peril and Weirdness at M Woods in Beijing, China; and American Idyll at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, GA.
White was awarded the Teiger Teaching Mentorship at Cornell University (2019); a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (2012); a George & Helen Segal Foundation Painting Grant (2005); The Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Residency (2004); and the Leon Golub Scholarship (2001). Her work was included in Phaidon’s anthology Vitamin P2: New Perspectives in Painting with an essay by Barry Schwabsky (2011).
Public collections include Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit, MI; The High Museum, Atlanta, GA; RISD Art Museum, Providence, RI; Museum Goch, Goch, Germany; Bank of America, New York, NY; Kranzberg Art Foundation, St. Louis, MO; Saks Fifth Avenue, New York, NY; Taguchi Art Collection, Tokyo, Japan; UK Art Museum, Lexington, KY; Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Atlanta, GA; Savannah College of Art & Design, Savannah, GA and Lacoste, France; UBS Art Collection, New York, NY; Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield, OH; Red Bull Art Collection; The Shinola Hotel, Detroit, MI; and ARCO Foundation, Madrid, Spain.