Bascha Mon
Memories, Recollections and Traversing Landscapes
By Taylor Bielecki, October 16, 2026
The recent exhibition Kin Terrains, spans over four decades of Bascha Mon’s work. It’s expansive, thoughtful, and curated with great care. Through Tapetto Volante’s Tribeca space, the exhibition becomes a retrospective of Mon’s explorations into painting, encaustics, sculptures, and works on paper. Getting to interact closely with the various time periods of work is a wonderful way to discover Mon’s process, explorations, and her engagement with family history, domestic space, travel, and memory. These themes that permeate throughout the exhibition involve both emotional and physical geographies in various forms- which allow us to take a deep dive into Mon’s childhood, her history, and her entire career. Mon takes us on a journey and it’s as if we are traversing misty mountainsides and winding landscapes to experience it all alongside her.
The title of the exhibition, Kin Terrains, describes family as both an emotional geography and a physical terrain. It can flow, change, layer and expand, just like Mon’s paintings and painting clusters. Throughout the exhibition, kinship takes form through inherited histories, recalled memories with imagined family members, remembered interiors of places in the past, and distant landscapes transformed by the passage of time. Figures, objects, and places are assembled, fragmented, and reconfigured, all occupying a shifting territory between reality and an invention of memory. The theme of mountains appears in many of the works, especially the one titled Paddling and Feeling Silly or Goofy Ghost Riders. It was interesting to hear that Mon has been preoccupied with mountains since childhood, experiencing them as seemingly insurmountable and ominous forms, yet also as seductive, as she makes her own interpretation of them to be enticing. In these works, the colors vary, layers show how hues blend and how Mon’s hand builds up surfaces. And while the mountainous forms appear to be vast, Mon also makes them very intimate and energetic.
Knowing Mon’s interest in mountains and terrains, the arches in many of the works stand out as mountains or even rolling hills. The textured surface of the piece titled Family Portrait E32 suggests an unyielding terrain that expands and seems to add to our journey through the piece. The encaustic layers allow the cool blue and light green to shimmer through and give the piece a mystical glow. The mountainous elements to the works and surfaces symbolize the journey of remembering- sometimes it’s smooth, and sometimes piecing together the fragments involves scaling a precipice. Within this piece, like many of the others in the exhibition, Mon’s surfaces offer many opportunities to discover new details as we get to uncover pieces of her memories. This happens as we notice her choices of colors, shapes, forms, and connections throughout the compositions, we can excavate more and more.
Mon’s process floats between a nice balance involving both freedom and constraint. The freedom to build upon and recreate the memories permeates through the work. The freedom of form and a constant evolution is also present- especially in the clustered canvas works, where Mon can choose to add on another section if the memory should continue at another time. While the aspect of constraint is not entirely visible, I took this part as perhaps being the memories themselves. Since some pieces are imagined memories or memories that may not be entirely complete- the boundary per se lies here, however; Mon often leaps over that constraint. Letting her recollections and created spaces develop and keep growing until she sees that the work is complete. Letting the color, composition and energy of the canvas guide her.
After thinking about Mon’s process more, a note in the press release caught my attention: “During a recent studio visit, Mon reconsidered the unfinished painting and observed, “Now that I see it again, it could be finished.” Her statement establishes the conceptual point of departure for Kin Terrains. Here, the term unfinished does not signify failure or abandonment, It instead describes a state of continued possibility in which works remain open to revision. Change becomes a welcome opportunity”. What becomes most exciting to me is the idea that memories can be repeatedly revisited and transformed as we experience more over time. I really enjoy this idea within Mon’s works, as the works seem to carry a continuous active energy. One where light seems to keep growing and permeates into each piece, and it's definitely shown through Mon’s landscapes, where she connects canvas to continuously build and expand space, similar to how we build upon compartments of our own memories.
Paddling and Feeling Silly or Goofy Ghost Riders, 2012, Oil on Linen, 48 x 48 in
The compositions that are assembled as canvas clusters are the first pieces that welcome you near the door. And the welcoming energy carries throughout the exhibition. With multiple canvases connected together such as in the works titled Toys of the Gods and Bretagne Carnac, Mon takes us on a journey through various spaces. Not entirely uniform, she expands upon space, as if exploring a long forgotten room in an old childhood home. The edges of the canvases seem to dissipate, especially as I focus on her use of color and the expressive brushstrokes that build up shapes and forms. With these pieces, Mon brings in multiple viewpoints. With these viewpoints placed in front of us on a singular plane, moments are compressed into a single image, transforming geographic sites into psychological environments instead. Within these pieces, Mon allows color, gesture, and form to move freely across the surface. Her marks, colors, and brushstrokes loosen the boundaries between landscape, memory, and abstraction as they all meld together and settle into a space which we are invited to visit.
The pieces that I found most comforting and endearing were her portrait pieces that were installed in conversation with ceramic portraits in front of them. This placement made both iterations of work very intimate. Her portraits depict relatives that immigrated from Europe; some ancestors whom she has never met. These portraits show images of people whose lives survive only through names, stories, and partial records given to her through family members recounting them. Mon uses this as a way to take absence and mold it into a form, bringing them to life. Her visual invention with these works allows her to construct relationships across generations and to give form to people she could never have known. Her own hands build up the ceramic forms, filling them with various kinds of objects such as feathers, flowers and encaustic wax, and here, her hands that carry that family history on their own and reconstruct it with focus and care. By placing these pieces in the beginning of the exhibition, it’s as if we are welcomed by her relatives just as much as Mon herself welcomes us into her own space.
This relationship between domestic spaces and imaginative recollections of those spaces continues in two of my favorite pieces titled Comfy Chair Floats on the Magic Carpet and Comfy Chair Sinking as Memories Rise to the Surface. Within these works, an ordinary chair is released from gravity and suspended within a field of pattern and movement. While the space and chair are both empty, it gives off a welcoming energy. This space welcomes me to sit down, to experience the joy Mon must have felt when creating this space, filled with a sense of rootedness and home. Especially as the couch seemingly floats between mystical green light and a soft plus carpet. This suspension stresses the freedom of the space where things are not fully rooted in reality as the memories surround you. Another interesting note is that Bascha defined the floating couch work as "Ode to Matisse". After noticing that remark, I could feel the energy, and the mystical colors that make up Mon’s compositions walking along the same veins as Matisse and how he built up his own expressive spaces.
With this exhibition, Mon recreates memories, spaces, and faces. She captures the essences of the people or places that hover within her mind. Her works make these memories tangible and Mon can now share them with all of us. The paintings and ceramic work transform commonplace objects into forms of familiarity. The paintings offer a place to settle and safe surroundings. While the sculptures and cluster paintings build an even more physical presence. While we explore the show, we get to experience Mon’s life, history and work. Her processes pull us into these spaces and bring them to life right in front of us. It’s as if the stories emerge from the walls, welcoming all who enter the gallery.
Bretagne Carnac, 1992, Oil on Canvas, Panel A (top right), 22 1⁄2 × 21 1⁄2 in Panel B (center), 34 × 48 in Panel C, (bottom left), 24 × 24 in