Erica Mahinay's 'Rhythms' at T293 in Rome Explores Slowness and Materiality

Erica Mahinay, a 40-year-old California-born artist based in Los Angeles, presents her solo exhibition 'Rhythms' at T293's new space in Piazza del Catalone, Rome, running until June 2, 2026. The show features twenty-four intimate-scale works that invite close observation, emphasizing subtle tonal variations, line, and form. Mahinay's practice is rooted in a physical approach to painting: she uses her body to drip, pour, and manipulate pigment, creating layered, luminous compositions with rhythmic tension. The exhibition's title references composer Olivier Messiaen's non-linear rhythmic articulations and draws on anthropologist Kathleen Stewart's concept of 'atmospheric attunement.' Mahinay's work engages with questions of touch, surface translucency, and porosity, merging the sensual with the perceptual. Born in 1986 in Santa Fe, she earned a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute (2008) and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2013). Her work is held in the Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles, and the Pinault Collection, Paris. In 2023, she was included in the Hammer Museum's 'Made in L.A.: Acts of Living' biennial. In 2024, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Creative Research Grant for material experimentation at Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara. The exhibition positions Mahinay as a deliberate heir to American abstract expressionism, reworking its foundations through a contemporary bodily sensibility that prioritizes slowness and meditative gesture.