Overview
Flowers Gallery is pleased to present Agentic Forests, the first solo London gallery exhibition by New York-based artist Justin Brice Guariglia.
Agentic Forests is a series of large-scale pictures in acrylic on white gessoed linen that depict primal forest ecosystems as agentic: not objects, but as subjects that far exceed human comprehension. The works embody our dialectical blindness and entanglement with these living systems in the same frame.
Begun some fifteen years ago, this series explores primal old growth forests around the world, inch by inch, through a process that captures and collapses dozens of focal planes into a single field of space and time, resulting in a visual density that overwhelms the eye and directly challenges our sense of human exceptionalism.
Guariglia shifts each picture into the ultraviolet spectrum, flooding the field with violets, cyans, magentas, and spectral whites. While the gesture references the UV-sensitive vision of birds and insects, it more importantly allows the viewer to slip into a more-than-human Umwelt, forging a sensory encounter with a foreign intelligence most of us may have never experienced before.
The largest works are immersive thirteen-foot murals, their foliage close to human scale. Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park, Washington (2026) is a dense network of white forms that cascade and germinate across the surface, tinged with purple. The field is ontologically flat, having no foreground, no background, no center, no edge. The forest is rendered uncannily familiar - their shapes and structures are known - yet their rich complexity feels alien.
But agency is not ours alone. It runs through everything living and nonliving, each thing shaping the next. The forest operates at temporal and spatial scales we cannot perceive, and withdraws from us; no single view can contain the whole. The result is a blind spot - we mistake a sessile world for a still one. Yet the forest is vibrantly alive - sensing, communicating, remembering - and in doing so, becomes an actant, shaping everything in reach. New science shows us that the forest passes signals between members and across species, in a language we are only now learning to read.
Guariglia's pictures explain none of this. They do not show a place; they put you inside a sapient system so vast and intertwined, so unlike anything we know, that the act of comprehension breaks down, leaving the viewer only able to sense. The work is a reminder that our eyes are only one narrow way of perceiving this world we are so thoroughly entangled with and deeply estranged from.
Agentic Forests previews a forthcoming travelling museum show to be announced in Autumn 2026.
203.2 x 271.8 cm / 80 x 107 in, Edition of 1 plus 1 artist's proof
152.4 x 203.2 cm / 60 x 80 in, Edition of 3 plus 1 artist's proof
114.3 x 152.4 cm / 45 x 60 in, Edition of 5 plus 1 artist's proof
Justin Brice Guariglia (b. 1974) is a New York-based artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, photography, and public installation, investigating human entanglement with the shifting ecologies that sustain life on Earth. Working in dialogue with scientists, philosophers, and poets, he flew a series of missions with NASA beginning in 2015 to document Greenland's rapidly changing ice - work that became the subject of Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene, his solo exhibition at the Norton Museum of Art, the USC Fisher Museum, and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. His public installation series -WE ARE THE ASTEROID, and ECO-HAIKUS FOR MARQUEES - place text-based work in civic space.
Other solo exhibitions include REDUCE SPEED NOW! An Earth Day commission takeover of the courtyard of Somerset House, London. His work was included in the 2019 Venice Biennale as an official collateral event, and has been shown at Storm King Art Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Kunsthal KAdE, and the Colby College Museum of Art.
Guariglia is currently a Climate, Earth, and Society Distinguished Fellow at the Columbia Climate School. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Howard Foundation Fellowship at Brown University, and was shortlisted for the COAL Art and Environment Prize. He previously served as Senior Fellow and Artist-in-Residence at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, and as Distinguished Fellow and Special Envoy to the Ecological Crisis at the Pratt School of Architecture.