MACARENA ROJAS OSTERLING BRINGS THE PACIFIC TO NEW YORK

Praxis Gallery presents In The Whitewater, the first New York solo exhibition by Macarena Rojas Osterling (Lima, 1985). On view through July 10, 2026, the show brings together drawings, paintings, and sculptures organized around a single physical experience: the moment a body is caught inside a breaking wave.

The exhibition is built on a tension that runs throughout Osterling's practice: her training as an architect — with its demand for precision and control — set against the daily reality of motherhood, with all of its unpredictability, play, and tenderness. That collision produces works that sit on the edge between order and release.

At the heart of the show are the drawings. Line by line, Osterling builds forms that approach musical notation, interrupted wherever a word, a foreign mark, or a pause intrudes. Many of those interventions belong to her children: strokes made on a kitchen counter while tending to an infant, words in Spanish and English, fragments of reggaeton songs. The pages work as mnemonic maps charged with the time and place of their making.

The glass sculptures operate in a different register. Molded and blown into sinuous, cloud-like blocks, they suggest geological formations or deep-space objects. Suspended between liquidity and solidity, they capture the instant a wave stalls before retreating. As Osterling herself has described, they "echo the sensation of being wrapped, pulled, and held within a dense, unstable medium."

The paintings, meanwhile, serve as counterpoint: layers of canvas, drawing, paint, and emulsion that recall the texture of wet sand after the water pulls back. Where the drawings and sculptures register motion, the paintings reach — imperfectly — for stillness.

In The Whitewater is on view through July 10, 2026, at Praxis Gallery, 501AW 20th Street, New York, United States.