Majestic Denali, Seen Through Cynthia Daignault’s Conceptual Yet Painterly Lens
At Olney Gleason, “Denali” offers 12 different views of the same mountain, but when seen as a whole, the paintings become a complete work
Celebrated for her distinguished approach to long-form painting, Cynthia Daignault has built a critically acclaimed body of work over the past 20 years. Creating monumental, multi-panel installations that explore themes of memory, time, and the American landscape, she has produced a series of 365 small oil canvases painted during a period of isolation in the woods, 360 small paintings made after a 30,000-mile road trip around the perimeter of the continental United States, and she is currently exhibiting a 288-panel, 24-foot-long landscape painting of Denali in Alaska, also known as Mount McKinley, the highest mountain peak in North America.
On view at New York’s Olney Gleason gallery through March 28, 2026, her solo exhibition “Denali” features 12 unique landscape paintings that depict the symbolic mountain in various modes of representation and with distinctive display methods, emphasizing different ways of seeing. Exploring how Americans perceive, understand, and assign meaning to nature, the Baltimore-based artist addresses issues like climate change, our oversaturated image culture, and the obsessive urge to contribute to it, while highlighting the country’s breathtaking wild lands and their looming loss—all with subtle political undertones.
Born in Baltimore in 1978, Daignault spent her childhood exploring the Cone Sisters’s renowned collection of modernist art at the Baltimore Museum of Art and wandering through the encyclopedic collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art during visits to her grandparents in New York. She was educated in a more conceptual style of art at Stanford University while spending countless hours viewing works at SFMOMA. While earning her BA in 2001, she traveled to Paris for a year to deepen her study of painting techniques, emerging as a young artist with both theoretical and painterly interests.
Moving to New York, she furthered her education by assisting established artists, including Kara Walker, and by writing about art and editing publications, while participating in group and solo exhibitions and becoming the Associate Director of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, where her ideas about painting and the contemporary condition began to gel. Initially, her art about art paintings featured a crisp, realistic style inspired by Edouard Manet, but after she began creating serial works, her brushwork became looser and more post-Impressionist, without becoming overly expressive.
“When I painted 365 paintings of the sky for For I Love You More Than One More Day (2013),” Daignault told Galerie, “my inner Monet or Van Gogh began to emerge, making the brushwork more prominent. I began with tighter renderings, but as the year progressed, I explored more, played more, and pushed the paint further. After repeating the rendering of 50 clouds, I wondered how else I could paint them. How loose could it get? How minimalist could I become? When you see that work in real life, it’s really an index of brushwork, like 365 different ways to paint a cloud. It really changed me as a painter.”
Returning to landscape painting after several years, “Denali” offers 12 different views of the same mountain, but when seen as a whole, the paintings spanning the gallery become a gesamtkunstwerk, or a complete work of art. An inner niche of a gallery sets the tone with two small diptychs, one vertical and the other horizontal. Images appropriated from a variety of sources, including Google searches, social media sites, and print publications, Wonder Lake (all works 2026) pictures the mountain reflected in a lake, mirrored in two stacked canvases, as if to suggest that everything that follows is a mediated doppelganger. Meanwhile, the Denali diptych features an eponymous GMC pickup truck in the canvas on the left and the mountain that it’s nobly named after on the right—highlighting the commercialization of and the conflicts over public lands, as the mountain was restored to its indigenous name under President Obama and then renamed Mount McKinley by President Trump.
Another pairing of canvases, 1 : 72, presents two identical views of the mountain at different scales. The smaller canvas depicts a view of the mountain through a 35mm lens or a representation of it on Instagram when viewed on a cell phone, while the larger painting shows the idyllic scene that every visitor aims to capture. The larger canvas showcases a masterful display of brushwork, using only two round brushes of different sizes to beautifully layer wet-on-wet paint.
“There’s something in my practice that I am really starting to cultivate, both in how the works are painted and how they’re constructed,” Daignault shared. “This show emerged from very formal questions. I was interested in exploring the concept of the multiple. The serial has been so significant in my work that I have begun to ask how the function of seriality operates differently. I wanted to investigate different ways that two, three, or multiple images could come together to create something holistic, where each piece is an experiment in thinking—whether it’s a diptych, a collage, a metaphor, or a mapping of information.”
The unstretched painted elements in Cut Piece resemble a paper collage made with oil on linen, the main medium used for all the paintings. They feature sections of the deconstructed mountain image hanging from a top line, arranged in an overlapping pattern. Bibliography (Sydney Laurence) reproduces a double-page spread from a book featuring captioned paintings of the mountain by the landscape painter Sydney Laurence, the first professional artist to make Alaska his home in 1904. And, Wish You Were Here amusingly groups small paintings of simulated postcards depicting recurring tourist scenes of the mountain’s landscape into a grid, resembling a display of merchandise in a park gift shop.
“Each of the works was an attempt to explore how paintings can be combined in different ways,” Daignault added, “whether through the serial presentation of a grid, with pieces stacked on top of each other, or placed side by side. It’s about how they can be read differently, which is a very formal way to plan a show.”
Stacking is a key technique in several works, including the previously mentioned Cut Piece. High on a Rocky Ledge, which juxtaposes painted botanical studies of Alpine flowers over a silkscreen image of the mountain, is named after a poetic love song by Moondog about a climber who admires the Snow Maiden Edelweiss, symbolically falling to his death to be forever united with her in springtime. The painting 12:00 layers a small canvas of Denali’s soft, glowing twilight at midnight over a larger canvas of the mountain at noon, capturing the 24 hours of daylight during the summer solstice.
Nearby, the minimal Midnight Sun displays the glowing mountainous landscape as a painted 35 mm slide, floating above a white monochrome field, strikingly composed with horizontal brushstrokes, while Alpenglow layers the mountain range with photo filters, altering its ambiance with analog and digital techniques to show how something old can always be seen anew.
On the opposite side of the gallery, Memento combines a painterly view of the snow-covered mountain with a digitally printed topographic view of its terrain, leading into the exhibition’s pièce de résistance, the 288-panel portrayal of Denali. The perfectly spaced linen panels appear abstract up close, yet they form a highly realistic image of the mountain when viewed from afar. Breaking down the stunning scene into its parts reveals the magnificent mountain, composed of natural elements shaped over millions of years.
The centerpiece of the curated exhibition, the painting interacts with the architecture of the strikingly designed space, echoing the gallery’s gridded ceiling and floor, as well as its telescoping connection to the city, state, country, and global environment.
“I always carefully plan the entire show,” summarized Daignault. “I visit the gallery several times and work with both physical and digital models of the space from the beginning. As I develop the works, I visualize their placements in my mind and then position them in the models. I wrestle with each individual canvas as I create it, but that is never separate from my larger process of working on the entire show. I know exactly where everything will go, and that rarely changes. However, for me above all else, I always hold in my mind how I want a show to feel—feelings are the North Star by which I navigate. I am always thinking about how a viewer will encounter a show, how it might move them, and how they might be changed by the work.”
See “Denali” until March 28 at Olney Gleason gallery, 509 West 27th Street, New York, NY.