For more than fifteen years, Landon Metz has developed a distinctive language of painting through his exploration of color, material, perception, and form. His recent engagement with the human body expands this language, opening up new possibilities between representation and abstraction. The contours of the figures give rise to fields of color that shift between recognition and ambiguity.

Working from gestures, movements, and fragments of the human figure, the New York-based artist creates compositions in which even the smallest physical detail can become the starting point for a new work. As he explains: “It’s an ongoing process of discovery. A very small movement or gesture can become a very significant painting. I think it’s important for me to look with patience and presence.”

For his current exhibition at von Bartha, Metz presents two interconnected paintings. The five-part composition Untitled, 2026, extends the serial structure of his earlier work, while deriving its forms from the human body. Across the canvases, blue fields of pigment approach and recede from one another, their defined contours held in tension with the softness and absorbency of the raw canvas. In the single red painting Untitled, 2026, the body emerges through a cropped arrangement of curves and color. The figure remains present without becoming fully legible, its identity protected in a space between physical intimacy and abstraction.

Throughout the exhibition, abstraction and figuration are not opposing approaches but interconnected possibilities within an ongoing artistic inquiry. The paintings explore how we perceive form, inhabit our bodies, and experience the world around us. With these new works, Metz further extends his investigation into the relationship between painting and lived experience.