Carter Burden Gallery presents Material evidence, an exhibition bringing together the work of Hilda O’Connell, Debra Salomon, Sumayyah Samaha, and Martha Stotsky. Though working across painting, mixed media, textile, and three-dimensional sculpture, the four artists share a compelling sensitivity to material, texture, line, and form. Their abstract works are united by vivid, richly layered color and a warmth that emerges through their distinct approaches to surface and gesture. Across the exhibition marks accumulate, materials transform, and lines move between structure and spontaneity, creating pieces that invite a closer look.

Together, these artists demonstrate how material can become both subject and language, leaving behind a tangible record of gesture and transformation.

In Hilda O’Connell’s color field paintings, color becomes both subject and expressive force. Her early fascination with the calligraphy of Medieval manuscripts led to a lifelong interest in language and the visual structures of alphabets, while abstraction opened another avenue for exploring visual communication beyond literal meaning. In these works, color is liberated from naturalism and allowed to expand across open fields with chromatic intensity, creating spaces in which hue, scale, and formal relationships carry their own language.

Drawing from years of observing the urban landscape and the cultures encountered through travel, Debra Salomon’s three-dimensional wall sculptures are informed by what she calls a “personal thesaurus of weight, skin, fragrance, textures, form and physics.” Translating the sensory qualities of the world into abstract forms that occupy a space between the real and imagined.

Sumayyah Samaha approaches abstraction through an intuitive visual vocabulary developed over decades of painting. The artist’s stream of consciousness determines the composition; playful shapes and rich colors are connected by lines, which create boundaries between the negative spaces of the canvas. Samaha’s focus is on color, texture, contours, weight, and defining edges; these paired with her choice of appropriate medium tell her visual story.

Martha Stotzky’s freestanding sculptures transform discarded tree-cage armatures through yarn, thread, weaving, and knotting, allowing the properties of the materials to guide each form as it develops. Her improvisational process captures the “spontaneity, energy, and gesture” of weaving, tightening, loosening, wrapping, and knotting, while disparate and often forgotten materials are brought together to create a sense of wholeness.