Firelei Báez at Hauser & Wirth

Firelei Báez arrives at Hauser & Wirth New York with an exhibition that takes its title from a sensation rather than a concept — feet squelching on wet grass, nourished by uncertainty. Across two floors of the 22nd Street location, the Dominican-born, New York-based artist extends her engagement with colonial legacies and the African diaspora’s natural, spiritual, and cosmic reverberations while shifting away from the discernible figures that have anchored her previous work toward something more atmospheric — paintings and sculptures that register through sensation before they resolve into form. On view May 12 through July 31.

View of Nature: The Centerpiece of Firelei Báez at Hauser & Wirth

The exhibition’s anchor is View of Nature, an eight-panel painting stretching across the entire back wall of the gallery’s first floor. Based on John Emslie’s 1852 engraving — a taxonomic rendering of climate and geography from equator to Arctic Circle — Firelei Báez allows the original’s classificatory structure to flicker through the surface while subverting everything it stood for. Fragments of text, diagrams, and cartographic markings emerge and dissolve within richly layered passages of foliage and light. The palette transitions from warm tropical tones into icy whites and blues, culminating in frozen terrain. Where Emslie rendered the natural world as a system to be measured, Firelei Báez conjures a field where intuition and embodied knowledge take precedence over applied classification.

Ciguapas in Bronze: Firelei Báez and Dominican Folklore

Nearby, two towering bronze sculptures of ciguapas command the first floor. The ciguapa — a female trickster of Dominican folklore who recurs across Firelei Báez’s career — appears here as equal parts woman, plant, and animal. One is adorned with plumes of real feathers, another with sculpted foliage. They kneel, double, and coil, bound by thick rope-like braids that read simultaneously as hair, viscera, or vegetal growth.

The effect is accumulation and strain — tension between heaven and earth, between the weight of history and the possibility of being freed from it. The gallery’s concurrent Carol Rama exhibition operates in a parallel register of bodily transformation, and the two shows create an unexpected dialogue about what the body can carry and what it can become.

The Second Floor: Firelei Báez Beyond Figuration

On the second floor, monumental works on paper shift from the terrestrial toward a more ethereal frequency. Lambent fields of color radiate and crystallize across the surface, steered by gravity, time, and the physical limitations of the artist’s reach. The forms resist immediate legibility, dispersing across registers that are at once cellular and as cosmically vast as interstellar space. For Firelei Báez, the shift away from figuration is not an abandonment but an expansion — a way of asking what happens to meaning when the body dissolves into its environment and the boundary between subject and landscape stops holding. On view at Hauser & Wirth, 542 West 22nd Street, New York, May 12 through July 31, 2026.