Heather Day, born in 1989 in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, lives and works in Joshua Tree, California. Heather Day received her Bachelor of Fine Art in 2012 from Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Maryland where she studied painting and art history. Select solo and group presentations include The Pit, Los Angeles (2025), Almine Rech, Paris (2024), König Galerie, Berlin (2024), Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (2024), Art Basel, Miami (2024), The Armory Show, New York (2023), Marfa Invitational (2023), among others. Day’s work has been featured in W Magazine, Art Forum, New American Paintings and Galerie Magazine’s “Next Big Thing”. Her paintings can be found in collections such as Fort Wayne Museum of Art and The Macedonia Institute.
Day’s abstract paintings draw the viewer through atmospheric shifts of color and map-like etchings. Pools of pigment flood across canvases forming layers of stitched contours beneath a lexicon of gestural mark making. Day’s painted canvases are dissected and fastened together, propagated and regrown, uncovering forms that echo between paintings. Within the rhythm of repetition, and the body’s own limitations, this method of painting embraces chance interactions and the way a mark evolves as the artist attempts to replicate it. By reproducing a marking, or cutting up and binding nebulous forms into slotted bays, Day mines human error and the opposing forces of control and chaos. Those ideas of challenging perception and sorting through memories are a constant source in Day’s conceptual well, rooted in myriad cultural shifts, languages and international migrations she experienced growing up. Living first in Hawaii, then Japan, back to Washington D.C., and finally Chicago, where she discovered her love of painting before attending Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Rooted in the traditions of abstract expressionism, Day’s paintings reflect a growing universe where language and communication are less concrete. Personal symbols, jotted down like errant notes, or emotive slurries of color synthesized from the natural world around the artist, create a visual language for the viewer to decipher.