Solo Series Spring 2026

Guizi Gao is a figurative expressionist oil painter whose work explores the human body as a mutable vessel shaped by social, biological, and psychological forces. She works in large-scale oil painting, fusing Renaissance and Baroque compositional structure with gestural distortion and layered, tactile surfaces. Influenced by the London School, particularly Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville, she treats paint as corporeal matter, building and erasing flesh-like forms. Her signature headless or obscured figures are stripped of fixed identity, transforming from portraiture into archetypal presences that carry social, emotional, and existential resonance. Gao’s series *Realm of Chaos – Amazing Grace* are inspired by Daoist cosmology, tracing cycles of vital spirit descending into the body, awakening, self-tempering, and spiritual renewal. Figures dissolve into organic geometry, translucency, and childlike symbolic forms, reflecting the flow of qi (气), resilience, and the natural ascent of the heart-mind. The works engage themes of womanhood, pregnancy, breastfeeding, loss, and rebirth, presenting the body as both intimate and universal while highlighting the delicate balance between vulnerability and strength.

Stephanie Manzi is a painter and educator from Upstate New York, currently based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her MFA from Tyler School of Art in 2022 and her BFA from SUNY Purchase in 2014. Manzi teaches as an Adjunct Professor in the Foundations Department at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design and Delaware County Community College, as well as an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Painting Department at Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Her work has been exhibited widely in various galleries across Philadelphia and Southern California, and she has received several awards and residencies for her artistic contributions. Her artistic practice explores ecology through the use of color, pattern, and material. Manzi's work is informed by environmental observations from her childhood in Upstate New York and her experiences in the urban landscape of Philadelphia. She investigates how the brain interprets new images based on foundational memories, focusing on essential visual elements by breaking color into bands and surface into texture. Her current work reflects the changing patterns of her daily life, particularly in response to the challenges posed by the pandemic.

Ben Pranger’s wall-based constructions slowly grow into emergent forms. Small pieces of wood are assembled to enclose and traverse the space in front of the wall. The work follows simple rules that unfold organically; the materials circulate and loop back on themselves to establish the dimensionality of the piece. These entangled forms either open up as linear configurations in space or are condensed and layered into structures resembling stepped pyramids. These labyrinthine architectures map a recursive mental space that morphs into evolving worlds. Over the last few years, color has entered into the work, so that pattern and color, like a refrain or code, are woven throughout the piece to form a kind of constructed painting. Pranger is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work explores emergent systems, liminal spaces, and invented worlds. He has shown his work throughout the U.S. and has participated in artist residencies at Kohler Art/Industry, Fine Arts Work Center of Provincetown, the Marie Walsh Sharpe Studio Program, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He has received sculpture grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the New Jersey Council for Art.