Larissa Lockshin makes paintings that shimmer, shift, and never quite settle. They hold your gaze for a moment, then change—depending on where you’re standing, how the light moves, or what kind of day you’re having.

Her latest exhibition, Strawberries and Other Secrets, brings eight new works to The Gallery at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, where she recently completed a residency as part of our year-long curatorial program. The title feels like a note passed under the table or a memory you try not to forget. It suits the work—playful, vivid, and just a little bit elusive.

Larissa is known for her abstract paintings on satin, framed in hand-carved pine. Each piece is made without brushes. Instead: oil, soft pastels, her hands, and the dyed satin surface itself. During her time at Ace, she stretched, dyed, marked, and carved—building a body of work that explores texture, light, and the soft boundary between painting and sculpture.

The works hang in a single line across the gallery walls, like a series of windows—each one opening onto a glimmering, half-familiar landscape. Some evoke foliage or winding paths, others just a feeling. She leaves areas of satin untouched, allowing the fabric to shine through and catch the light. What appears accidental is intentional. What seems still is actually shifting.

Every detail is made by hand, from the surface to the frames. Each painting is named after a real racehorse—a system where no name can be repeated, a quiet nod to the uniqueness of every piece. Even when the tools stay the same, the results never do.

We spoke with Larissa about her process, her materials, and what it was like creating this series from a hotel room in winter.

The title Strawberries & Other Secrets is immediately evocative—playful, intimate, a little mysterious. What inspired the name, and how does it relate to the themes in your work?

The show title is lifted from a book of short stories that I used to read as a kid. It was one of the first collections I read that covered so much geography and so many different circumstances. I saw these windows into other lives. It felt close to a real experience but stunted, just a sketch of a place and time. Trying to capture something big in a tiny frame, an intense emotion, or an experience into something immutable is something I don't necessarily consider but happens while I work.

Your paintings often feel like they exist in a dream state—loose, gestural, and just on the edge of figuration. How do you decide what to reveal and what to obscure?

When I work I just go back and forth; some have a heaviness or density that comes from layering, struggling with obscuring or revealing the light that bounces off the satin base. The decisions are natural instincts. I don't try to rationalize or restrain anything too much. Sometimes, I think about Bob Ross saying, "This is your world, do anything you want to do in here.”

Your palette is both restrained and emotional. How do you think about color as a carrier of meaning?

Color has a different meaning for every individual. We associate feelings with different colors based on our own memories and experiences. For example, periwinkle blue will always remind me of my childhood bedroom. I enjoy it, but perhaps someone else had a terrible event occur in a periwinkle room, and so I couldn't blame them for turning away from a periwinkle blue painting.

Is there a particular material or gesture in your process that feels especially personal or essential to you?

The use of satin as the base of my paintings was either experimental or accidental, but without the qualities of the base fabric, my work would not be the same. The variation between the shining, glittering fabric base and the matte areas of color and pattern applied to it allows the viewer to experience the piece differently from all angles as they move around it. The material choices lend sculptural elements to what appears to be just a painting. Some people told me that outwardly "feminine" aesthetic choices could be alienating or limiting, but to me, they elevate and personalize the work.

You’ve said that process is a big part of your practice. Can you walk us through how one of these paintings comes into being—from blank canvas to final image?

After stretching a layer of plain canvas on the bars, I stretch a layer of plain satin over it. I mix a bunch of dyes together and make some sample swatches, then I choose the color I want and dye the entire satin canvas with a big paintbrush. After that dries, I can start working on it with soft pastels and oil pastels. I usually start with one area or element and work outward from there. When I'm happy with the balance of the painting, I start building a frame.

Do you think of your paintings as containing secrets—whether yours or the viewer’s? What secrets?

I think the paintings themselves feel like secret places. The secret is that you can go anywhere you want in your imagination.

Is taking risks in your work something you think about consciously, or does it come naturally through the act of painting?

It's important to take material risks in order to find something that really serves what you're trying to accomplish. However, when your risks are rewarded, it makes you think twice about altering anything further. Maybe, though, there is something even more impressive—without taking risks you might never find out if that's true.