Municipal Bonds presents Toward Orphism, a group exhibition on view March 15–April 26 in the gallery's annex, considering Orphism's legacy in contemporary abstraction. Coined in the early 20th century, the term describes a movement that expanded Cubism's geometric foundations, emphasizing color, rhythm, and optical vibration. This sensibility continues in the work of Austin Thomas, Blaise Rosenthal, and Zaida Oenema, who each approach abstraction through material, structure, and the cadence of form.
Austin Thomas draws from the city's architecture and kinetic energy, creating monotypes that balance structure and spontaneity. Forms coalesce into layered, interlocking compositions, distilling urbanity into intuitive order. Blaise Rosenthal's paintings develop through shifts in tone, texture, and repetition. His restrained framework allows surfaces to register subtle variations of mass and depth—while atmosphere and material take precedence. Zaida Oenema treats paper as both surface and structure, incising delicate geometries with a soldering iron. Her reliefs hover between presence and absence, mapping the natural world at the edge of perception.
More inclination than ideology, Toward Orphism considers how abstraction builds through contrast and accumulation, where material decisions guide form toward a sense of motion and dimension. It looks at how structure holds and transforms, how geometry bends toward movement, and how process asserts itself over time. Thomas, Rosenthal, and Oenema work within abstraction's evolving language, drawing from Orphism's pursuit of dynamic equilibrium without resolution.
Austin Thomas is an artist, curator and community builder based in New York City. Her work alternates between personal narratives and public actions. She makes sketchbook diaries that explore her everyday experiences and act as a natural springboard for her improvisational and painterly monotypes, and she creates hybrid sculptural/architectural objects to facilitate thought and discussion. Thomas' monotypes feature shapes, sometimes overlapping and sometimes in translucent colors. Made by using craft foam and templates she borrows from a metalwork shop, the results have an improvisational buoyancy. She has developed ghost-marking, in which she prints several times on the same piece of found paper: book covers and pages, ledger sheets, and loose-leaf notebooks. The resulting images combine spontaneity and precision, referring to a range of modernist styles, including Constructivism, Minimalism, and Color Field painting.
Her work has been widely exhibited, both nationally and internationally. In New York, Thomas has been featured at the Drawing Center, SculptureCenter, Art in General, White Columns, and Morgan Lehman. She has also exhibited at Municipal Bonds in San Francisco; the Robert Lehman Art Center at Brooks School in North Andover, Massachusetts; at Seed Space in Nashville, Tennessee; as well as in Singapore, Australia, Hungary, and at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna, Austria. Thomas is a graduate of NYU, and has received numerous residencies and fellowships, including Wave Hill, Guttenberg Arts, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Smack Mellon, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and at Bascom Lodge, Mount Greylock Summer Residency.
She is featured in the book titled Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists and its sequel The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life, both edited by Sharon Louden. Thomas has been written about in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Art in America, the Brooklyn Rail, the Paris Review and Hyperallergic. Her work is in the permanent collection of the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington, DC, and New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City. She is represented by Municipal Bonds.
Blaise Rosenthal (1973) is a self-taught artist born in New York City. At the age of six, his family relocated to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, where he would spend the remainder of his formative years in an isolated region of Northern California. He cites the solitude of this period, and his immersion in the local wildlands as the basis for the environmental archetypes that have informed his abstract vocabulary. Currently residing and working in Truckee, California, Rosenthal uses the experience of years of extensive travels as a means of developing a broader context within which to place his work. In his practice, the artist prefers simple materials such as charcoal, pastel, acrylic paint and paper or canvas, and focuses on the dynamic nature of abstraction to create paintings that often reference landscape while offering both a subjective sincerity and an objective accessibility. In this way, he endeavors to dismantle the loneliness of his youth by creating connection through work that transcends identity-oriented barriers and touches on fundamental aspects of our common human experience. He is represented by Municipal Bonds.
Zaida Oenema (1980) is a Dutch/Finnish visual artist who lives and works in The Hague, the Netherlands. Oenema studied Nordic Arts and Crafts at Ålands Folkhögskola, Finland; earned a BFA in Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague (2004); and an MFA in Photography at St. Joost School of Art and Design in Breda (2009). In the past decade, she has moved from photography and video performance to drawing with various tools and materials including graphite and pastel, scalpel and soldering iron, paper and wood. Oenema exhibits her work regularly at galleries, fairs, and museums in the Netherlands. She has shown with Galerie Helder, The Hague; Art Rotterdam with We Like Art; KunstRAI Amsterdam; Art on Paper Amsterdam; Papier Biënnale, Museum Rijswijk; and CODA Museum, Apeldoorn, among others. She has shown widely in Germany, including at Kunsthaus Erfurt; Galerie Ursula Walter, Dresden; Projektraum Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin; and Art Fair Blooom, Cologne. In the US, she has presented solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions with Municipal Bonds, San Francisco. Her work is held in many private and public collections, notably the permanent collection of CODA Museum, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam. Recently, Oenema received a prestigious grant from the Mondriaan Fund for established artists to support her work for four years (2022-2025). She is represented by Municipal Bonds.
