In Elemental Hours, works by Greta Waller, Byron Kim, Victoria Gitman, and Sarah Schlesinger unfold through repeated engagement with familiar motifs. Ice, sky, fabric, and landscape serve as precisely circumscribed subjects through which time, perception, and duration are brought to the foreground.

Waller’s paintings of melting ice register subtle shifts in light, temperature, and surface, emphasizing material change as an active component of the image. Attending to moments when perception remains provisional, she treats the subject not as a fixed image but as a site of ongoing variation. Related works depicting a cherry pie and a charred heart extend this attention to conditions of heat, exposure, and transformation, allowing abstraction to emerge through close observation rather than reduction.

Kim’s Sunday Paintings, an ongoing weekly series since 2001, pair a sky painted with handwritten notes recording the day’s events. The skies vary from week to week, while the format remains constant, allowing meaning to accrue through accumulation rather than narrative. Over time, the works function as both a record of lived experience and a sustained investigation of color, atmosphere, and repetition.

Gitman’s paintings approach duration through exacting realism. Working precisely to scale, she renders garments and fabrics with meticulous attention to surface, pattern, and placement. As repetition and precision intensify, representational detail begins to verge on abstraction, shifting emphasis from objecthood to structure and sustained looking.

Schlesinger’s landscapes and gardenscapes explore similar perceptual concerns through imagined forms. Her darkened hedges and horizons rely on perspective, shadow, and compositional restraint, slowing perception and foregrounding the mechanics of seeing. These works operate less as depictions of place than as constructions shaped by duration and attention.

Across Elemental Hours, repeated motifs generate a network of formal and conceptual relationships. Rather than advancing a singular narrative, the exhibition emphasizes accumulation, return, and variation. Painting emerges not as an instantaneous act, but as a temporal practice—one in which perception, material, and time remain in continuous negotiation.

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Victoria Gitman (b. 1972, Buenos Aires) lives and works near Miami in Hallandale Beach, Florida. Her work is included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among others. In 2015 she was the subject of a mid-career retrospective, Victoria Gitman: Desiring Eye, at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Recent solo exhibitions include Zippers at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, as well as exhibitions at Garth Greenan Gallery, New York; Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo; the Las Vegas Art Museum; Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles; and the Bass Museum of Art, Miami.

Byron Kim (b. 1961, San Diego) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and San Diego, CA. Kim is a Senior Critic at Yale University and a Co-director at Yale Norfolk School of Art. He received a BA from Yale University in 1983 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1986. Among Kim’s numerous awards are the Louise Nevelson Award in Art, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (1993); the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant (1994); the National Endowment of the Arts Award (1995); and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1997), among others. His works are in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA; the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Tate Modern, London, UK; the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.

Sarah Schlesinger (born 1988, Pennsylvania) received her BFA from Taylor University in 2010, before graduating with an MFA from New York Academy of Art in 2015. She is a recipient of a 2015 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and the 2015–2016 Chubb Postgraduate Fellowship at New York Academy of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include Eye Level at Huxley Parlour, London, and Two Trees at The Journal Gallery, New York, as well as exhibitions at Palo Gallery, New York; Gratin Gallery, New York; and Vardnan Gallery, Los Angeles, among others.

Greta Waller (b. 1983, Indianapolis) lives and works in Los Angeles. She was the subject of a solo exhibition at Fernberger in 2025 and was recently included in a group exhibition at ATLA, Los Angeles, curated by Nichole Caruso, entitled the host, the guest. She will be included in an upcoming solo presentation at Frieze Los Angeles with Fernberger Gallery, as well as a group exhibition in Los Angeles in honor of the Oscars curated by Michael Slenske. She received her BFA from Cooper Union and her MFA from UCLA, and also studied at the Pratt Institute, New York Academy of Art, Slade School of Fine Art, and Chelsea College of Arts in London. She has been awarded the Art Purchase Program at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2017); the Young Talent Award, Washington Art Association, Washington Depot, CT (2008); and Art at the Bridge, The Pink House, West Cornwall, CT (2007–2008), among others.