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 into questions of growth and transformation. Across these three artists' practices, an interest in natural phenomena encompasses the fundamental properties of matter and the expressive possibilities of color and light.
In his first exhibition with the gallery, Brooklyn-based artist Nathan Dilworth explores the generative potential of disruption through the collision of disparate imagery. His oil paintings combine painted and transferred elements, their overlapping forms interrupting one another and obscuring their original identities. These interactions give rise to unexpected chromatic relationships that evoke the experience of occupying multiple realities at once. His works inhabit an ambiguous space between material fact and perceptual experience, where color assumes a remarkable intensity even as the work's internal logic remains elusive.
Physical structure and perceived space converge in Fritz Horstman's Folded Cyanotypes. Based in Bethany, Connecticut, Horstman 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.
In her practice, Oakland-based artist Yvonne Mouser 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, iterative, and 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.
