Exhibits & Events

Maria Ansh’s exhibition Between Seeing and Feeling at Gallery 26 marks the artist’s first solo presentation in the United States. Ansh’s work is rooted in personal history. She spent her childhood in a traditional Russian village, where a close relationship with nature and the world of folk belief shaped a mystical perception of reality. Later, her interest in graffiti introduced a different visual language: saturated color, fluid forms, and expressive distortion.

Between Seeing and Feeling brings together drawings and paintings that begin with observation: of other people, of the self, and of the subtle emotional shifts that arise between the two. Fleeting impressions are transformed into constructed psychological images, shaped as much by memory and feeling as by what is directly seen.Although the works often take the form of portraits, their focus is less on individual identity than on states of being: solitude, wandering, contemplation, fear. These states remain unstable, recurring in altered forms without settling into fixed meanings.Through color, texture, and fragmentation, Ansh intensifies and distorts perception. Looking becomes an active process in which external impressions are absorbed, reassembled, and transformed. The resulting images occupy the space between seeing and feeling, where attention to another person becomes inseparable from the attempt to understand oneself.

Artist Maria Ansh is having an exhibition at Gallery 26, opening September 11th from 5-8:00 p.m.! The work will be up for viewing for one month during gallery hours, which are Thursday-Saturday 12-5 p.m. and​ Sunday 1-5 p.m. Gallery 26 is located at 26 E. Baltimore Avenue.Maria Ansh (b. 1992) lives and works in Philadelphia. She studied graphic design in Moscow and spent over a decade creating street graffiti, an experience that shaped her approach to color, form, and an expressive painterly language. Working in painting and drawing, Ansh explores the multiplicity of identity, vulnerability, solitude, and the shifting boundary between inner perception and the external world. Her portraits and surreal spaces are inhabited by personal archetypes, symbolic figures, and strangers, drawn from memories of both the Russian countryside and urban life. Her work is characterized by saturated color, emotional intensity, and fluid distortion. She has exhibited at contemporary art centers and venues in Moscow, as well as at ARC Gallery in Chicago.