Marc Selwyn Fine Art is pleased to announce Michelle Stuart: Back to the Garden, an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and photographic installations spanning nearly four decades. Bringing together works from 1985 to 2023, the exhibition explores Stuart’s longstanding engagement with the botanical world and its relationships with earth, time, place, and memory. This exhibition anticipates Stuart’s upcoming retrospective at the Hammer Museum in April of 2028.

Since the 1970s, Stuart has been internationally recognized for a rich and diverse practice encompassing site-specific earth works, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and photography. A pioneer in the use of nontraditional media, she incorporates seeds, plants, soil, and beeswax into works that connect the physical material of the landscape with the histories it contains. In Back to the Garden, Stuart explores flora as a subject of contemplation, renewal and cultivation, where the promise of growth exists alongside the possibility of disappearance.

Stuart’s seed calendars translate these ideas into a distinct material form. In Seed Calendar: Amagansett (1994) and Seed Calendar: Wildflower California Poppy (1993), seeds gathered in Amagansett and Santa Barbara are incorporated into delicate paper surfaces. Crushed into the paper, the seeds become both material and mark, preserving a physical trace of the plants and places from which they originated. This process extends Stuart’s earlier earth rubbings, in which soil and minerals made the landscape itself an active participant in the creation of an image. In some seed calendars, she also applies heat to rupture the seeds, releasing oils and moisture that stain the surrounding paper. These irregular impressions introduce an organic unpredictability into the measured structure of the grid.

The calendar format connects the human impulse to organize time with the seasonal rhythms of growth, dormancy, and renewal. For Stuart, a seed embodies the possibility of future life while carrying a history of its own. She recalled being moved by an account of ancient lotus seeds that germinated after their discovery in an archaeological excavation in China, an example of life persisting across extraordinary spans of time. Her calendars hold a related tension: the act of rupturing a seed
interrupts its potential growth even as it preserves its material presence. Suspended between botanical specimen, drawing, and archaeological record, these works transform the seed into an enduring trace of life, linking the memory of a particular landscape to the possibility of regeneration.

The preservation of botanical material is also central to Stuart’s encaustic works. Three square encaustic paintings draw attention to the physical presence of wax, whose translucent layers catch the light and lend depth to the materials suspended within them. Her larger works, including Sabi (1989) and Anoka (Minnesota) (1985), extend this material exploration into a more direct engagement with the landscape. Earth, plants, petrified fossils, and archaeological shards are brought together with petroglyphic motifs derived from various sites. Embedded in wax, these elements preserve a material record of place, connecting natural history with traces of human activity.

A more elegiac quality emerges in the Extinct works of 1992, which combine botanical specimens, wax, and hand printing on rice paper. Their title introduces the possibility of loss into the act of preservation. Stuart has explained that the plants in this series were not themselves extinct; rather, they offered a way to imagine the disappearance of familiar forms of life. Held within the work, a leaf or stem becomes both a physical presence and a reminder of its vulnerability.

In Vanishing I (2021), and Disappearing (Self-Portrait) (2021), the grid reappears as a structure for gathering and comparing botanical images. In this body of work, photography continues Stuart’s sustained investigation of how an artwork can preserve an encounter with the natural world while acknowledging the passage of time.

Born in Los Angeles, Michelle Stuart has exhibited internationally, with solo presentations at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, among others. Her retrospective Michelle Stuart: Drawn from Nature originated at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham, in 2013 and traveled to the Parrish Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Her work was included in Viva Arte Viva, the 57th Venice Biennale, in 2017, and is held in major public collections worldwide.