Walking into Madeleine Bialke’s second solo exhibition at Newchild feels like stepping into a haunted forest of memory—an unearthly terrain where the living and the spectral converge. Eidolons, a term borrowed from Walt Whitman meaning “spiritual images of the immaterial,” captures the essence of this new body of work, painted over the course of this year, and born from a brief but profound journey through California’s Sequoia National Park.
Earlier this year, just days before wildfires swept through the Los Angeles metropolitan area and San Diego, Bialke spent two days walking among some of the oldest living organisms on Earth, 300 kilometers north of Los Angeles. The immensity of the redwoods—giants that have witnessed millennia—left an indelible impression on the artist. “The trees themselves are ghosts in my mind,” she reflects, “they hold a presence, a purpose, but they are now immaterial—images in a visual diary.”
This exhibition is both an homage and a reckoning. Through Bialke’s fractured memory, the Sequoias rise as monumental figures of time—towering, near-mythic beings whose forms bear the marks of humanity’s impact on the climate, yet endure with quiet resilience. Their rings carry the memory of fires, storms, and centuries of change, as if the story of the Earth itself has been etched into their living flesh. Bialke holds these images like relics or “eidolons,” preserving what is most precious before it slips into history. Yet the forest she recalls is not untouched: it is encircled by wide, barren mountains where, as she describes, “swaths of trees have been burned to skeletons by increasingly violent wildfires.” These ashen slopes—silent graveyards that fringe the living grove—become the shadow to the Sequoias’ endurance, a reminder that their survival is neither inevitable nor guaranteed. In the interplay between the lush sanctuary and its scorched periphery, Bialke captures the dual truth of our era: that beauty and ruin, life and loss, now stand side by side, each made sharper by the other.
Artists: Madeleine Bialke
