Elisa Bertaglia: The Rest solo show at SARAHCROWN gallery, New York

NEW YORK - Oct. 22, 2025 - PRLog -- Opening: November 7, 6-8 PM
Exhibition: Nov 7 - Dec 6, 2025
Artist Walkthrough: November 15, 2025, 2-4 PM

SARAHCROWN is pleased to announce The Rest, Elisa Bertaglia's third solo exhibition with the gallery. This new body of work is inspired by the idea of rest not as absence, but as an active practice of regeneration, and continues Bertaglia's ongoing exploration of thresholds.

In this new series of paintings and drawings, rest becomes presence — a conscious state where stillness and the suspension of time open space for creativity, offering the energy needed for renewal. As in her earlier series Hic Sunt Dracones and The Dance, the investigation of thresholds (both physical and spiritual) remains central but here, it is expanded: threshold and suspension of time converge to frame rest as a transformative condition. In this state, stillness becomes a fertile ground. Pause holds possibility, and quiet reveals its own depth of vision.

Prompted by a personal period of forced rest and reflection, Bertaglia investigates the threshold of consciousness itself: the moment in which stillness and transformation coincide and when something enters awareness. At the center of the exhibition — and marking a new direction in her practice — are three mid-sized canvases that introduce the figure of the bird. Traditionally, birds symbolize spirituality, the soul, and positive transformation — from renewal and new beginnings to resurrection. All themes that inspired Bertaglia to create this new series of works. Depicted in varying degrees of abstraction, the birds emerge from magmatic backgrounds of dense foliage and imagined fauna. They occupy an atmosphere that is both mysterious and charged. The new palette of deep greens, reds, and purples intensifies this sense of a liminal, unplaceable space — a world hovering on the edge of a threshold.

The exhibition also presents three new emblematic works on gold along paintings without animal elements, highlighting the variety of Bertaglia's approaches. Leaves Are Growing From My Body (2025), for example, a dense carpet of flowers painted over a rose-gold plate, opens onto a precious, almost baroque dimension: here nature becomes ornament, an overflowing vitality that alludes to a corporeality in constant metamorphosis.

What makes Bertaglia's new work so compelling is its ability to translate profound concepts into imagery that feels immediate and luminous. With these works, she addresses complex themes through images of striking beauty and deceptive simplicity.
For more info, contact info@sarahcrown.com http://www.sarahcrown.com