GAVLAK is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring works by Miami-based artist Lauren Shapiro and New York-based artist Gordon Terry, two artists whose distinct yet complementary practices explore the intersections of art, science, and the natural world. The exhibition marks the artists’ first collaboration and their respective debuts with the gallery.
Working across painting and sculpture, both artists draw inspiration from organic systems, biological structures, and processes of transformation, translating the complexities of nature into abstract forms. Through highly experimental, process-driven practices, Terry and Shapiro investigate the relationship between chance and control, revealing unexpected connections between the microscopic and the cosmic, the organic and the constructed.
Terry's abstract paintings draw from a wide range of influences, including spiritualism, psychedelic experiences, scientific inquiry, and the history of modernist abstraction. His compositions feature vibrant, swirling forms that evoke microscopic organisms, cellular structures, and distant galaxies, suspended against meticulously finished surfaces. Terry begins by manipulating acrylic paint on large glass worktables, combining mediums of varying viscosities and employing brushes, compressed air, and gravity to create fluid, gestural formations. These accidental marks are subsequently transferred onto carefully prepared surfaces, where they chemically merge with a polyurethane spray coating.
The resulting compositions juxtapose the spontaneity of their creation with the precision of their arrangement, balancing the physicality of paint with an almost illusionistic sense of depth, as seen in Immaculate Constellation Program (2026). Often organized into grids or specimen-like arrangements, Terry's forms recall both scientific catalogues and historical cabinets of curiosities, while their psychedelic palettes and highly polished finishes challenge conventional notions of painting as a flat, two-dimensional medium.
Shapiro's sculptural practice similarly draws from scientific observation and material experimentation, exploring the relationships between nature, architecture, and time through intricate ceramic forms. Informed by fieldwork and excursions into environments such as the Florida Everglades and underwater ecosystems, Shapiro collects and documents organic specimens and architectural fragments, translating them into an extensive archive of molds. Combining traditional mold-making techniques with digital technologies, including 3D printing, she assembles these individual elements into complex sculptural compositions that resemble mosaics, geological formations, and imagined ecosystems.
In her Cascade works, Shapiro assembles modular vessels whose stacked geometries draw on the Art Deco tradition, then overtakes them with marine forms: barnacle and coral, the ridged contour of the sea urchin, the worn and pitted texture of tidal stone. Their surfaces appear less made than accumulated, as though the sculptures had been submerged and retrieved, holding geometric order and organic growth in tension. Moving between the organic and the architectural, Shapiro's sculptures transform fragments of the natural world into enduring ceramic structures, reflecting on ecology, material memory, and the interconnectedness of natural and built environments.
Together, Terry's paintings and Shapiro's sculptures establish a dialogue between spontaneity and precision, fluidity and permanence, and the microscopic and monumental. Both artists employ systems of collection, classification, and arrangement, drawing on the organizational logic of the grid while allowing experimentation and chance to shape their final compositions. Where Terry transforms fluid paint into seemingly weightless, otherworldly forms, Shapiro translates organic matter into intricate, architectural structures. Their works oscillate between scientific observation and imaginative speculation, suggesting new ways of understanding the natural world and its infinite variations.
