Villa Magdalena is pleased to announce Casey Bolding: Pasaia, opening on Friday, October 24. This presentation marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe. 

 

Organized in collaboration with Polina Berlin Gallery, on view will be Bolding’s (b. 1987, Denver, CO) new suite of paintings created during the fall beginning at Castel Carmel Artist Residency in Castillion, France, and ending at Villa Magdalena’s residency in the Basque Country in Northern Spain.

Pasaia, in Basque, refers to the 16th century medieval fishing village that achieved its fame as a center for maritime trade, shipbuilding and whaling at the height of the Spanish empire. Now, it bears the marks of decline -a place of passage more than permanence, shaped by transience and a quiet sense of decay.

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As the name suggests, it is a place of birth, of death, of fleeting souls and undetermined fate, of anonymity. Similar to a border town, it is a geographic gray area, where local tradition and custom are interrupted by the influx of foreigners who bring with them fragments from different cultures. Against this background, the North American painter, Casey Bolding, whose use of ephemera, personal photos, objects, and distant places from memory as primary subjects, brings together an idiosyncratic outline of the past and the present.

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The Basque region’s melancholic character with its dramatic coastline, shifting light, and stormy Atlantic weather propels forward Bolding’s uncanny psychological gaze on portraiture and landscape. Oftentimes the artist subverts the conventions of these traditional genres through a palimpsest of formal elements and a unique multimedia approach to painting.

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Bolding’s notion of composition as a patina of time and entropy begins with layered surfaces heavily built up with plaster and industrial paints, which are subjected to a vigorous process of scraping away, reworking, and reconfiguring. This process of addition and subtraction allows him to build a narrative around figurative gestures -developing scenes populated with characters and objects from varied sources. Here, the artist relies on discoveries or appearances in the materiality

of the medium. Informed by years spent painting outdoors, in abandoned buildings or decaying freight trains, he excavates imagery on canvas as he would on an empty wall he might happen upon: one that’s cracked, sun-bleached, and stained by the elements.

Although one could assume Bolding’s position as a narrative painter; his process reveals a nuanced sensibility where the unorthodox use of materials and the embrace of chance become the driving force of quasi-recognizable scenes. Accidental happenings emerge from the materiality of the picture plane like mirages in the desert. These material appearances are then composed with enigmatic visions from personal photographs of his immediate environment. Assuming the role of the witness - attuned to the act of looking at how people relate to their surroundings, how they become part of them or resist them- and growing up on the vast plains and expansive horizon of the American Midwest, Bolding’s visual sensibility is shaped by a place where one can see toward infinity, where mirages flicker and dissolve in an ever-receding frontier between perception and memory, presence and disappearance.

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Bolding (b. 1987, Denver, CO) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work has been included in exhibitions at Polina Berlin Gallery, New York (2025, 2024); LVH Art, London (2025); Karma, Thomaston, ME (2025); Pond Society, Shanghai (2025); Jack Siebert Projects, Los Angeles (2025); Shoot the Lobster, New York (2023); Mamoth, London (2022); and 1969 Gallery, New York (2019).