Glaessner often thinks through ideas with repetition. Born in Palo Alto, California, Glaessner was raised in Houston, Texas before moving to New York in 2007. Houston’s climate is hotly swampy, a coastal city with proximity to Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Walking around can feel as if stepping through a mist. With Glaessner often and repeatedly blurring her compositions with a careful swipe of a large brush, it can seem as if these figures are submerged in water or a haze, and it’s tempting to see this as Houston’s influence on Glaessner’s vision. But more directly, a 2019-2020 stay at Galveston Artist Residency, situated between the Bay and Gulf, where the sky and water meet, galvanized Glaessner’s work. There, she had time to focus and replicate ideas–playing with them– so as to understand her own work.

These new paintings continue several longtime thematic interests of Glaessner’s, including narratives from Western literature and Greek mythology alike. Nut (or Nwt), the Egyptian deity; goddess of the visible sky is frequently alluded to in several compositions through an arched body. Other mythic beings are recontextualized, such as Pygmalion and Galatea in “Mimesis” wherein a tiny third figure observing the scene skews the perspective, suggesting the artificiality of both Pygmalion and Galatea. Snippets of stories, texts, and poems fill Glaessner’s studio. As she made these works, poems by Georg Trakl and Sylvia Plath hung on her studio walls; all of these texts reflected on the singularity of transformation. But rather than mere interpretation or retelling of these texts, Glaessner’s paintings distill their essence as she reenvisions them using a lucid and adroit formalism.