Arranging Flowers
Arranging Flowers
Opening: September 18, 2025
Taymour Grahne Projects
I am lucky. At least looking at one of Gail Spaien’s paintings makes me feel that way. It is early spring in Maine and I am sitting at my dining room table writing this. I feel as though I am sitting inside one of Spaien’s paintings which leaves me with a mix of whimsy and exhilaration. Three vases full of flowers line my vision which then leads my eye through the window into the young Spring green of my backyard. The vases are full of flowers loosely arranged and act as an asymmetrical chorus line of color and texture. Yellow lilies sit in a mason jar, alongside a white pitcher full of branches overflowing with hot pink petals, the precursor to the quince fruit which its parent tree will eventually yield in abundance. For a moment the outdoors and indoors co-mingle as they do in Gail Spaien’s paintings and that lack of distinction is disarming. While Spaien's paintings are rooted in personal connection to place and past, they somehow exude an undeniable alluring strangeness. With all the beauty of decor and the natural world at Spaien’s fingertips she compresses time and space in a way that feels like a defiance of the visual laws of the real world and even, the laws of physics.
Years ago, I was introduced to ikebana, the ancient Japanese art form of flower arrangement. The art of ikebana creates a harmonious relationship between the natural elements used and the space around them where the arrangement itself brings nature and humanity closer together. It’s a tall order for a simple flower arrangement to highlight an art form’s ability to elevate but it does so by harmonizing the natural world with the formal principles of composition. In Spaien’s aptly titled exhibition, Arranging Flowers, at Taymour Grahne’s new space in Dubai, Gail’s current body of work is an amplification of this concept: art and botany in dialogue can elevate us all.
Interior and exterior worlds meld together on Spaien’s canvas leaving the viewer wondering where exactly this place might exist and how can I possibly get there. In the painting Waypoints, the interior is implied as we simply look out onto a blue moon rising over the ocean. The scene is punctuated by potted flowers, blossoming apple trees, and a stone wall; fabricated elements are carefully arranged as the foreground mirrors the qualities of the seascape. Through cascading shades of blue, these elements become harmonized into a singular space. The painting is formal, intimate, serene and is set on encapsulating a moment steeped in the fleeting impermanence of beauty.
Many of the paintings in Arranging Flowers contain still lives in the form of a set table. The dining table, an anchor of most domestic spaces, acts as a site of evidence of human presence - of life being lived inside. Gail sets the table as Magritte would, tilting the perspective dramatically toward the surface of the picture plane inviting the viewer to join. In Spaien’s painting, Habitat, a table in the form of a perfect circle faces the viewer. Covered in an intricate white tablecloth and dotted with ceramic vases and plates, the table hovers in space without any concern or reference to a stabilizing force, such as legs or gravity itself. The painting Ginko Leaves, is similarly disconcerting compositionally. In it, a row of decorative vases and vessels sit atop the painting's edge, the edge itself acting as stand in for the tabletop. Above the painting’s ledge a singular line points across the surface acting as the horizon while strategically placed ginkgo leaves hover over the scene. Both works remind me of Magritte’s painting entitled The Portrait, Brussels 1935, where a stark and flattened surface acts as a minimally set table. The focal point is what looks like a large, circular plated piece of ham with an eyeball staring directly back at the viewer. The headless eyeball, while disconcerting, is minor compositionally compared to this perspectival approach, which usurps logic and gives way to a sense that these spaces can exude both calm and disquiet simultaneously not through familiarity but through a personalized sense of order. In this regard, Spaien culls from a long history of artists using the still life as a means of distorting perspective through the use of conventions associated with the domestic.
The use of textile and pattern are undeniable elements in Spaien’s work and act as a mechanism for crafting intimacy yet it is simplicity that is the armature from which she builds her paintings. The formal components of spatial illusion co-mingle with an appreciation for the labor of craft. One can sense her desire to live in that space of making, just for the time being or, until the painting is done. It is a world of simple pleasures that hints at a human connection in its most subtle and intimate forms. You can picture a family having just left the space; things tidy but not “just right.” One has a sense that long moments of silence have existed in Spaien’s spaces; silences between people who are connected and don’t need the reassurance of language all the time or perhaps the silences that come with solitude. Her paintings are hopeful, wistful even, but not without a strangeness that makes you question their verisimilitude. Spaein’s paintings can occupy an almost dream-like quality where the improbable mixes with the probable. They clearly can’t be renderings of real places. At least so I think.
— Hilary Schaffner, Independent curator and writer
Arranging Flowers
Taymour Grahne Projects
September 19 - November 1, 2025
Warehouse D31-A, Alserkal Avenue Street 8, Al Quoz 1
Dubai, UAE