Opening Reception
Saturday, November 7, 5–7pm
Municipal Bonds is pleased to present Toward Biomorphism, a group exhibition featuring works by Nathan Dilworth, Fritz Horstman, and Yvonne Mouser, on view November 7 through December 23, 2026. A companion to Municipal Bonds' 2025 exhibition Toward Orphism, this presentation continues the gallery's engagement with the legacies of modernist abstraction. The biomorphic tradition provides a point of departure, with its affinities to living forms extending to questions of growth and transformation. Across these three artists' practices, an interest in natural phenomena encompasses the underlying properties of matter and the more elusive qualities of color and light.
Central to Dilworth's practice is painting's dual existence as image and object. Working with oil, his compositions bring disparate images and gestures into relation, their overlapping forms interrupting one another and obscuring their original identities. Drawing upon photographs of different places, Dilworth brings their distinct qualities of light into a single composition, creating chromatic relationships that evoke the experience of occupying multiple realities at once. His paintings inhabit an ambiguous space between material fact and perceptual experience, where color assumes a remarkable intensity even as the underlying logic of the composition remains elusive.
Physical structure and perceived space converge in Horstman's Folded Cyanotypes. He folds sheets of paper into intricate three-dimensional constructions, coats the paper with cyanotype fluid, and exposes them to sunlight. Once unfolded, the paper retains both the evidence of its creases and the photographic impressions of its former geometry. The resulting compositions are both a material record and an illusion of dimensional depth, their intersecting planes suggesting crystalline formations and the contours of landscape. Horstman's longstanding interest in geomorphology, particularly the formation and transformation of glacial environments, informs his investigation of natural structures and the forces that shape them. The complexities of natural light moving over his rigorous folded geometries introduce an element of chance into each composition.
Mouser's practice examines the organization of living systems and the processes of their evolution. Her work follows the seduction of material, where inherent qualities draw out tactile and iterative experimental making across mediums. These new methodologies and systems of construction are layered in process with narrative frequencies, perceptions of time, and science, where experiments of form and function become investigative tools to more deeply understand and explore a complex reality. Through repetition and subtle variation in wood and paper, her accumulative constructions evoke underlying universal structures of organic growth. Her work in cast metal, by contrast, turns toward erosion, as successive castings gradually diminish the precision of geometry, making entropy perceptible. These investigations reflect Mouser's enduring fascination with the paradoxical permanence of nature's flux and a sensitivity to it at the edges of order and disorder.
