Astrid Garcia: Ecstatic Schisms
curated by A.E. Chapman
theNextWave Gallery
August 23rd – September 13th, 2025
TheNextWave Gallery presents Astrid Garcia: Ecstatic Schisms, curated by A.E. Chapman on view from August 23 through September 13, 2025.
Ecstatic Schisms presents new drawings, paintings, and sculptures by Astrid Garcia that complicate notions of division and fixity associated with the phenomenon of being by emphasizing the slippage, shifts, and flux that make up the perpetual process of becoming. Interrogating psychological and emotional states through the corporeal form, Garcia challenges, disrupts, and collapses boundaries between body and psyche, self and other. In this exhibition, Garcia presents sculpture for the first time, merging her practice with the sculptural turn inherent within her drawings and paintings to date. The artist’s hallmark penchant for the visceral manifests across her oeuvre, merging effortlessly with this recent work. The sculptures Extremity, Between the Shoulders, and Below the Neck celebrate fragmented forms—a hand, a portrait bust, and a torso—and echo remnants of ancient works once whole. Yet, Garcia’s surfaces do not present an idealized, smooth surface common to much early sculpture of the figure. They embrace the tactility of plaster and its slippery shift when wet, recorded in its rough, hard surface upon drying. In all three sculptures, the internal gridded wire and burlap armature pokes out, revealing the skeletal structure within—a spine emerging, a ligament trailing out, a ribcage expanding through the open chest.
A triptych of charcoal drawings, Solidity Shifts, Stability Shifts, emphasizes the fluidity and multiplicity of the figure across its three panels. In each drawing, the face depicted appears consistent, implying that it is the same person across the work. Yet, the layered tangle of bodies, curled and extended into varying positions, suggests a combustible movement that seems to jolt the body out of any solid form as strokes of charcoal and eraser break up the contours of the animated figure. In the first two panels, the face is doubled giving the appearance of a glitch. The fragmentation and dissolution of the bodies coalesce into a larger form as the dark negative spaces holding them across the three sections create a V-shape evocative of a wing or the open language of an embrace. Here, Garcia fuses the process of making with the process of becoming through the materiality of charcoal and paper. She explores the elements of transformation, alchemy, and ephemerality inherent to the materials and the process from which they become—charcoal the result of wood burned at 400 degrees and paper birthed from wood pulp pressed into sheets to dry. Garcia’s works manifest as conduits for escape from the confines of the body in a desire to reclaim body, mind, and spirit as a transcendent flux of energy swirling collectively, before the Platonic division of matter and spirit that compartmentalized this three fold.
For Garcia, this division connects intimately with the concept of the abject, or the cast off. In her paintings, warm, earthly, bodily colors evocative of internal and external elements of corporal and terrestrial systems—dirt, fire, stone, sea and flesh, blood, even bile—fill the gutty forms core to her language. The broken swirl of figures within the paintings complicate and transcend any fixed orientation of the space they occupy. In these gestures, Ecstatic Schisms posits fragmentation and abjection as phenomena of transfigurative potential, as entry points to continually search, reach, long, and hope for an ecstatic release.
About the artist:
Born in San Diego, California to a family of Norwegian and Azorean-Portuguese descent, Astrid Garcia grew up painting and drawing with her mother who was an artist and architectural illustrator. She graduated from San Francisco State University with a Bachelors in Spanish and a minor in Political Science. Her studio art studies include classes at La Universidad Católica de Chile, Fort Mason Center for the Arts, The Art Student’s League, and she regularly attends Minerva’s Drawing Studio as both a model and artist. Recently, she was a resident at The Macedonia Institute. In Fall 2025 she will begin her Masters in Fine Arts at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.
About the curator:
A.E. Chapman is an independent curator, writer, and educator based in New York City. Most recently, she curated Care / Condition / Control at 601Artspace in Manhattan. Additionally, she works as a teaching artist with Access and Community Programs at the Museum of Modern Art, and her writing has appeared in IMPULSE Magazine, Cultbytes, ArteFuse, and Art Spiel. Chapman received her Masters Degree in Art History and an Advanced Certificate in Curatorial Studies from Hunter College where she was awarded the Edna Wells Luetz/Frederick P. Riedel Scholarship to support her masters studies based on her excellence in significant post-baccalaureate undergraduate coursework at Hunter in studio art and art history. She holds an undergraduate degree in journalism with a photojournalism emphasis and a minor in sociology from the University of Georgia.