Elisa Bertaglia

SARAHCROWN announces Elisa Bertaglia’s third solo show with the gallery, showcasing her newest series of paintings about rest as an active practice of renewal.

Elisa Bertaglia, The Rest, 35.5×25.5 in – 90×65 cm, oil on canvas, 2025

SARAHCROWN is pleased to announce The Rest, Elisa Bertaglia’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. This new body of work is inspired by the idea of rest not as absence, but as an active practice of regeneration, and continues Bertaglia’s ongoing exploration of thresholds.

In this new series of paintings and drawings, rest becomes presence — a conscious state where stillness and the suspension of time open space for creativity, offering the energy needed for renewal. As in her earlier series Hic Sunt Dracones and The Dance, the investigation of thresholds (both physical and spiritual) remains central but here, it is expanded: threshold and suspension of time converge to frame rest as a transformative condition. In this state, stillness becomes a fertile ground. Pause holds possibility, and quiet reveals its own depth of vision.

Elisa Bertaglia, Leaves Are Growing From My Body, 6×4 in _ 15.2×10.2 cm, oil on rose gold, 2024

Prompted by a personal period of forced rest and reflection, Bertaglia investigates the threshold of consciousness itself: the moment in which stillness and transformation coincide and when something enters awareness. At the center of the exhibition — and marking a new direction in her practice — are three mid-sized canvases that introduce the fi gure of the bird. Traditionally, birds symbolize spirituality, the soul, and positive transformation — from renewal and new beginnings to resurrection. All themes that inspired Bertaglia to create this new series of works. Depicted in varying degrees of abstraction, the birds emerge from magmatic backgrounds of dense foliage and imagined fauna. They occupy an atmosphere that is both mysterious and charged. The new palette of deep greens, reds, and purples intensifi es this sense of a liminal, unplaceable space — a world hovering on the edge of a threshold.

Elisa Bertaglia, The Rest, 35.5×25.5 in – 90×65 cm, oil and pencil on canvas, 2025

The exhibition also presents three new emblematic works on gold along paintings without animal elements, highlighting the variety of Bertaglia’s approaches. Leaves Are Growing From My Body (2025), for example, a dense carpet of fl owers painted over a rose-gold plate, opens onto a precious, almost baroque dimension: here nature becomes ornament, an overfl owing vitality that alludes to a corporeality in constant metamorphosis.
What makes Bertaglia’s new work so compelling is its ability to translate profound concepts into imagery that feels immediate and luminous. With these works, she addresses complex themes through images of striking beauty and deceptive simplicity.
With The Rest, Bertaglia offers not an escape from life’s struggles but a reorientation — an invitation to inhabit time differently, to enter the spaces where stillness and renewal meet.
The opening reception will be held on November 7, 6-8 PM. The exhibition will run until December 6, with an artist walkthrough on November 15, 2-4.

SARAHCROWN
373 Broadway #215 New York, NY 10013.
+1 347-393-4911

WEB  INSTAGRAM  ARTSY