There’s a moment when the paintings stop behaving like flat images on a wall. You stand in front of one expecting something contained, and then it shifts. The edges feel open. What’s in front of you starts mixing with what’s behind you, your own body in the room, the light sliding across the floor. You’re no longer just looking. You’re pulled into the painting’s logic.
That unsettled sensation runs through Drea Cofield’s exhibition Thresholds at Kravets Wehby Gallery.
Her earlier work relied on images that already existed. People sent her photographs, often nudes, and she translated them into paintings. There was a built-in distance. The subject decided how they wanted to be seen, and the image arrived pre-framed.
Here, that distance tightens and sometimes collapses.
Many of these new paintings come from direct observation, often involving her own body in real time, anchored in actual places. You can feel the shift in immediacy, the way light hits skin or architecture, while the slower, layered decisions of painting remain.
It doesn’t feel like a clean break from what came before. Both approaches coexist, uncomfortably close. A figure might emerge from a landscape that feels at once observed and remembered. Interior and exterior blur. Psychological weight presses against physical space until they occupy the same compressed surface.
The result is slightly disorienting, in a good way, like standing where multiple ways of seeing overlap at once.
As a viewer, you can’t stay detached. The paintings keep reminding you of your own position, where you’re standing, how you’re looking, how your presence interrupts the scene. Neutrality isn’t an option.
There’s also a new sense of exposure in the making. Cofield has described painting as an act of faith, releasing the work before she fully understands what it’s become. That risk shows. Some decisions stay raw, unresolved, visible on the surface.
Thresholds doesn’t announce a dramatic reset. It feels more like a quiet tightening, different speeds and sources of looking pulled together and held in tension long enough for the tension to settle in.
