Tabula Rasa brings together four artists whose paintings emphasize our relationship with the visual world born out of personal experience and perception. The exhibition is eponymously titled after works by Swiss artist Rafael Grassi-Hidalgo, paintings depicting a blank canvas. In Tabula Rasa, abstract and non-figurative works by these four distinct artists explore and create a visual dialogue with this timeless concept of a “blank slate”.

Since 2017, Felix Baudenbacher exclusively paints with his own oil paint, BAU Pink. His consistent and straightforward color choice allows the artist to express as accurately as possible things that he feels are fundamental to his being. For Baudenbacher, BAU Pink is both a vehicle for self-revelation and a soothing layer of protection from the grating sensation of being alive in the world. Living in London, Felix Baudenbacher was born in Switzerland and studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the U.S.

Rafael Grassi’s works depict paintings. In Tabula Rasa I & II, empty panels lean against a pinkish or grey-green background. The small scale paintings are exploratory in their reconcilement of illusory perspective, the deceit of the figure in image and the attachment to pictorial matter at large. Born in Switzerland, Rafael Grassi-Hidalgo grew up in Spain where he studied Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. In 2006, he retuned to Switzerland as artist in residence of Villa Sträuli. Currently living in Winterthur, Switzerland, he is a 2018 recipient of the prestigious ‘Werkpreis des Kantons Zürich’.

The recent paintings by Washington D.C. based David Hayward are drawn from an intuitive process in which he invents, borrows, and discovers what resonates with him. Like the structures within a cell, simple basic forms dominate the artist's vocabulary and inhabit his paintings. The pursuit to understand the visual workings of his complex and multilayered formations is what is most intriguing and rewarding about David Hayward's oeuvre.

Debuting in Tabula Rasa, Patricia Satterlee’s Grace Series was long in the making. Each painting began with a field of green pigment as a bridge between the worldly and the spiritual. Forms emerge out of the field and present themselves, coaxing identities from levels of addition and subtraction. For Satterlee, the experience of time in these paintings was in a perpetual flux, and not necessarily forward. They progressed in one way and regressed in another at the same time. It was a dance of equilibrium to the end.