I met Alison Blickle on the eve of her opening at Kravets Wehby Gallery in Chelsea, NYC. The paintings for Future Ruins were already on the walls, glowing under the lights, the room still hushed before the crowd. Anticipation was thick, but the space remained private. In that moment, we spoke about beauty, technology, and grief.
Blickle’s figures are radiant, staged, almost too beautiful. She doesn’t hide from it. “That’s intentional,” she told me. The new body of work is set in a dystopian future where nature no longer exists as we know it. People still long for a connection to something larger, but the only way they can feel it is through avatars inside digital landscapes. “You create an avatar of yourself, what you wish you looked like, and swim in oceans that no longer exist, walk through forests that have been erased. These paintings are portraits of those avatars. The beauty is stunning, but it’s also artificial. They’re not real people. They’re curated images of who someone chooses to be.”
This dystopian thread runs through Future Ruins like a warning. Filters, AI-generated faces, bodies shaped digitally, all of it feels uncomfortably close. “It’s science fiction, but it’s also about right now,” she said.
When I asked about the cinematic quality of her compositions, Blickle traced it back to photography. “I’ve studied images from the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and I’m inspired by fashion photographers working today. They’re some of the most inventive artists, even though they’re placed in a commercial zone. Their editorials often echo classical painting, history paintings, big groups enacting narratives, and dramatic compositions. They create little worlds. That’s what I admire, and what I try to do myself. I stage the image like a photographer before I paint.”
Her women hold archetypes, muses, goddesses, rebels, but they’re also deeply personal. Blickle admits they’ve often been alter egos. “They get to do things I wish I could do. I live vicariously through them.” With Future Ruins, that connection is sharper. She spoke about grief and isolation shaping this work. “For many years I painted large groups interacting. These figures feel more isolated, and many are sad. That’s where the personal heart comes in.”
The result is a body of work that oscillates between allure and critique. The figures are dazzling, but their perfection is unsettling. They carry both the fantasy of beauty and the dystopia of its collapse. They are avatars, beautiful, artificial, and haunted by longing.
