Cynthia Daignault: Denali
Olney Gleason is pleased to present Denali, an exhibition of new works by Cynthia Daignault (b. 1978) on view from February 19 to March 28, 2026, at 509 West 27th Street, New York.
Daignault is an artist celebrated for using painting to explore the contemporary condition. With emotive brushwork and radiant color, she explores a range of topics spanning history, culture, politics, and art. Denali sees Daignault return to the theme of landscape, for which she is perhaps best known, expanding on ideas from earlier series, including Light Atlas (2014), Elegy (2019), and As I Lay Dying (2021). This exhibition anticipates several upcoming institutional presentations: Daignault’s iconic landscape work Light Atlas will go on view at Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY, from June 20 to November 1, 2026, and ICA Boston will present a major solo museum exhibition, debuting a new monumental work on the Valley of Yosemite, from August 27, 2026, to January 18, 2027.
For her latest exhibition, Daignault takes a single subject, Denali, and deconstructs the Alaskan mountain across hundreds of canvases. Denali, meaning ‘The Great One’, is the highest peak in North America and a contested symbol of American exceptionalism, white supremacy, and frontier mythology. The mountain also stands as a grand reminder to the existential threat of climate change, a theme which weaves throughout the show. As Arctic regions are warming at a rate four times faster than the global average, the mountain is simultaneously a symbol of our country's majestic wilderness and of its impending collapse. The exhibition features eleven new paintings, including the artist’s latest monumental work: a 300-panel, 24-foot-long portrait of Denali, which explores this binary between beauty and loss.
Daignault paints in the post-digital world, echoing the hyper-mediated experience of contemporary life by referencing digital photography, social media, augmented reality, and internet image arrays. All the works in this show are multipartite, engaging the digital syntaxes of clone, dupe, copy, paste, glitch, crop, and delete. Daignault’s refusal to present a single scene stands in poignant contrast to the canon of American landscape painting born from the Hudson River School. Instead, Daignault posits an expansive version of reality, where representation unfolds serially across time and space, rather than in one single sublime moment. Painting becomes a means to organize and slow the ceaseless flow of images and time, to meditate on acts of memorial and remembrance, and to capture, according to the artist, “what it means to be alive at this specific moment in time.”
Daignault received a BA in Art and Art History from Stanford University. The first major monograph on her work, Light Atlas, was published in 2019. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2011 Rema Hort Foundation Award, and a 2010 MacDowell Artist Fellowship. Her work has been featured in recent institutional exhibitions including The Living End: Painting and Other Technologies, 1970-2020 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Soft Water Hard Stone, the 2021 New Museum Triennial, NY. In 2026, Daignault will present a major solo institutional exhibition at ICA Boston, MA. Daignault's work is in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has presented solo exhibitions and projects at many major museums and galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MASS MoCA, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and White Columns. She lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland.
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