Municipal Bonds is pleased to announce Blaise Rosenthal: A Far Country, the artist's second solo exhibition with the gallery, on view September 12 through October 31, 2026.
A Far Country brings together two contrasting bodies of work central to Rosenthal's practice: his Monoliths, monumental in scale and presence, and Overpaintings, a series of small works that explore painterly abstract potentials. The title suggests a place beyond immediate reach, shaped by Rosenthal's most familiar terrain: the natural world and the forms it leaves in memory. Landscape is absorbed into these paintings through mark and the physical life of the surface, carrying the imprint of places he has encountered and inhabited over time.
Rosenthal's relationship to the land is formative. The mountains of Northern California have shaped his visual memory since childhood, giving him an enduring sense of distance and orientation. Their vastness continues to inform his practice, where place is carried through both the internal and external. In this way, land becomes territory in a deeper sense, bound to identity and belonging.
The Monoliths take their name from an archetypal form, elemental in its mass and charged by its association with permanence. Their distilled, asymmetrical compositions carry an expansiveness that exceeds the boundaries of the canvas. Two or three abutting canvases form a single work, emphasizing the physicality of the painting even as the surface opens onto something atmospheric. Through their formal qualities, the paintings reference a distilled geology and draw from deeply embedded aspects of human consciousness.
Rosenthal's Overpaintings are an intimate investigation into painting. Rarely exhibited, they reveal a more experimental side of the artist's practice. He describes them as an attempt to paint "no way," working outside the vernacular for which he is better known, his approach shifting dramatically from one work to another. Many are worked on over years, accumulating layer upon layer as he moves between them and the Monoliths. Their small scale draws the eye inward. Color carries more of the composition, and each layer becomes part of what follows. The artist has described these paintings as arising through "random acts of joy and desperation," capturing the pleasure and uncertainty that give the works their particular character.
Seen together, the two bodies of work complicate any fixed idea of Rosenthal's abstract language. The Monoliths possess a sense of gravity and duration. The Overpaintings feel closer to the present tense. Both emerge from the same deep attentiveness to material and place.
A Far Country extends the idea of distance. A country is a territory with its own internal order, defined in relation to what lies beyond its borders. In Rosenthal's work, abstraction becomes such a territory, formed from lived landscape and given both mystery and coherence through painting. Country also carries the notion of belonging. It is more than land, made personal through lived experience. Over time, its contours can become part of one's inner life, shaping perception long after the landscape itself has receded from view. In A Far Country, distance enters that relationship, giving the idea of place a wider psychological and pictorial dimension. The mountains that formed Rosenthal's work remain deeply embedded in the paintings, not simply as landscape, but as part of the visual language through which he understands the world.
