Chapter NY is thrilled to present Heart Throbs, Mary Stephenson’s first exhibition in the United States featuring a new series of paintings.

Giving physical structure to memory, Stephenson builds spaces that hold visual remnants of the unconscious mind. She approaches her canvases as fertile surfaces with the potential to recreate an emotion or bodily sensation. Stephenson applies thin layers of brightly colored paint that seep and recede into her canvases before revealing a final image. Minute gestures—such as a small slit, a fine thread, or a sliver of light—provides entry points into these highly-saturated surfaces, inviting viewers to look closer.

Inanimate objects assume a central role within Stephenson’s world, expanding and contracting within vast, yet barely populated fields of vision that offer room for movement and exploration. Within these liminal spaces, Stephenson plays with scale, shifting between colossal structures and miniscule forms that dislodge her viewer from any logical sense of space and instead encourage an introspective spatial awareness.

In Heart Throbs, Stephenson delves deeper into the connections that tether one’s interior self to the external world. Diffuse edges or sharp lines provide routes into, or out of, Stephenson’s paintings and suggest a desire for connection and sense of belonging. Within her cinematic settings, Stephenson considers the intimacy of loneliness and tests how to fill a space without anyone there. The visual building blocks that populate Stephenson’s otherwise uninhabited planes, give shape to the memories barely beyond recollection that inform our individual experiences. The artist describes them as cathartic playgrounds, offering pathways to a feeling.

Mary Stephenson (b. 1989 London, UK) lives and works in London. She graduated from the Royal Academy Schools, London in 2023 and the Glasgow School of Art in 2011. Stephenson has had solo exhibitions at MASSIMODECARLO, Paris; LINSEED Projects, Shanghai; and Incubator, London. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Jeremy Scholar, London; Rose Easton, London; Michael Werner Gallery, London; and Ginny on Frederick, London; among others. Her work has been acquired by the Loewe Art Collection, Madrid and the Government Art Collection, London. In January 2025, Stephenson will have a solo exhibition at White Cube in Paris.