Kiki Smith: “The Presence” 2022

Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, January 30 to March 8 2025

At Sears-Peyton Gallery (Jan 30–Mar 8, 2025), New Studies distilled Jane Rosen’s lifelong attention to animal presence into spare, lucid objects and drawings. The show paired hand-blown, pigmented-glass “birds” poised on limestone or travertine plinths with sheets of Korean watercolor and gouache. Works that read like field notes pared to essentials. The figures sit in dialogue with their stone bases; on the walls, feathered marks and negative space do the same work at paper scale. The installation made her method plain: subtract until the living line remains.

Born in New York City in 1950, Jane Rosen worked across sculpture and drawing, often marrying blown glass to found or carved stone to consider animal intelligence and our ties to the natural world. After early decades in the New York scene, she relocated to the California coast, teaching widely (including SVA, Stanford, and UC Berkeley) while developing the avian forms that became her signature. Rosen died on April 18, 2025, in Northern California.