Júlia Godoy, Bone Black I (2024), charred bone, cold wax, and oil on birch panel, 60 x 40 in.

Davis Keller is pleased to present its inaugural exhibition, In Studio: A Selection of Work by Genevieve Gaignard, Júlia Godoy, Katherina Olschbaur, and Emily Velez Nelms. 

Genevieve Gaignard (b. 1981) uses an interdisciplinary approach to investigate personal histories,  popular culture, and racial currents through her lens as a biracial woman. Gaignard inserts herself into her work by mining her own experiences and by utilizing soft color palettes, humor, and tropes of domesticity. Her goal is to create environments and experiences that awaken critical thinking and offer a shift in viewer perspective. By activating spaces using haunting nostalgia for America’s past-as-present, her work asks viewers to interrogate the imperfect relationships between our inner worlds, public lives, and modern events. Vintage wallpaper is often a motif in her collage, sculpture, and installation work. This material serves as a backdrop for the found objects and images she highlights in each of her chosen mediums. Gaignard’s collages embrace xerography, which involves a meditative process of sifting through historical news media, magazines, and portraiture. Taken as a whole, Gaignard’s practice is an ensemble of visual renderings that affirms Black livelihood and provokes reflection on the often hostile realities of the lived experience.

Júlia Godoy (b. 1996) is a Brazilian artist whose paintings are created using locally sourced natural pigments. Her work explores memory, place, and the emotional symbolism of color, using earth based materials as both medium and metaphor. Rooted in a deep relationship with the natural world, Godoy’s paintings function as meditations on time and transformation. Each work develops organically through the use of handmade pigments, which themselves are shaped by geography, season, and chance. This introduces an inherent unpredictability in the process and final outcome of each work, which the artist embraces. Godoy’s surfaces are soft and atmospheric, marked by subtle shifts in color and tone. Each painting becomes a singular record of land, material, and memory––an intimate reflection on presence and impermanence.

Katherina Olschbaur (b. 1983) was born in Austria, and currently lives and works in New York. Emboldened by a move to Los Angeles in 2017 to push the boundaries in exploring the tenuous relationship between representation and abstraction, Olschbaur’s painting practice is known for creating distinctive viewpoints on light, color, and form. Her work reflects on connections and conflicts between dichotomous ideas and states of being, including systems of order and chaos, creation and destruction, cultural knowledge and personal experience, devotion and obsession, and collective and individual unconscious. Across both her large scale paintings and intimate portrait works, Olschbaur uses a signature surrealist style that elegantly balances both boldness and tenderness. 

Emily Velez Nelms (b. 1991) develops objects, environments, and images that unsettle the dynamics of visibility, where the act of looking loses neutrality. Her work attends to the ways bodies and landscapes become entangled in circuits of desire, consumption, and power, particularly within the tropics that shape her own history. Velez Nelms often references marine ecologies, most recently bioluminescent organisms, and their strategies of evasion and concealment, through hypervisibility. With this work, she recasts the gaze as a contested site, one that reveals both its predatorial forces and proliferating agencies. Southern Florida and its waterways remain a central and sustaining force in her practice.

For more information, to arrange a visit, or to inquire about artwork availability, please email info@daviskellergallery.com