Theresa Daddezio’s paintings shed light, revealing speculative fictions and near-futures where human and plant forms entwine. Deeply rooted in abstraction and color theory, Daddezio builds worlds through seemingly impossible collisions and harmonies of color. Neither wholly synthetic nor organic, hues of lush magnetas, furious green-golds, and silver-purples cross-pollinate. Her sense of color evokes both late 20th-century transcendental abstraction and Orphic lyricism, resonating with the work of Sonia Delaunay, Ferdinand Leger, Agnes Pelton, and František Kupka.

Petal-like structures bloom from intricate linear forms, suggesting the botanical rhizome. Daddezio paints these as channels for transporting light, color, and energy across the canvas. Patterns replicate, and loop back onto themselves, becoming body-like forms or strands of code. These systems are in constant flux, operating according to their own mysterious parameters of space and time. Daddezio’s varied brushwork creates shifts between layers, openings and recesses within the plane of the painting.

While evoking transcendental painting and Medieval cosmology, Daddezio’s landscapes are imbued with a sense of loss for our changing climate. As Andrew Woolbright writes, “The spiritual is her acknowledgment ‘that nothing ceases.’ It is a concept of spirit that is bound up in ecological dread and death, a kind of post-humanist spiritualism. … We have time to consider a plant that never was, may never be, that Daddezio keeps and preserves somewhere else. But just as easily, the intensity of our focus may remind us of our own garden, and of all the natural miracles they sustain, to maintain and care for in the here and now.”

Theresa Daddezio lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA in Visual Art from Hunter College (2018). She participated in Brooklyn’s Sharpe Walentas Studio Program (2021-22) as well as the Wassaic Residency Project in upstate New York (2018). Daddezio has exhibited work at Nathalie Karg Gallery, Hesse Flatow, DC Moore Gallery, and New York Studio School (New York City); Transmitter Gallery (Brooklyn); Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia); the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; and Studio Kura (Itoshima, Japan). Daddezio’s work was also featured in New American Paintings (2021).