Exhibition Review: Laurie Fader’s “Opium Dreams” at Moremen Gallery On View Through August 30th

 Blue Lady" Gouache on Duralar, 2023.

By NATE HESTER August 11th, 2026

If you are anywhere within a thousand miles of Louisville, Kentucky - yes, that includes you, New York, 739 miles away - come drink some bourbon, catch a horse race, buy a souvenir baseball bat, and do not miss Laurie Fader's magically encrusted, visionary, dystopian landscapes, on view at Moremen Gallery through the end of August.

What makes these delightfully dizzying, happily haunted tableaux so captivating? Simply put, they are a feast for the eyes, mind, and spirit. In an age dominated by punk paucity - think Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian, a banana duct-taped to a wall - and the manipulative, pixelated clickbait and sound bites of internet spam, these 27 works on canvas and Yupo stand apart for their generosity.

These paintings hold nothing back. They give and give and give some more - though not always what you want or expect. An electric palette of pinks, lavender-grays, chromium greens, and yellow oxides combines with sensuous paint handling and mysteriously playful figuration. Primordial spores, plankton, and fern fronds become peacock feathers, chicken talons, or human heads in profile. The result gives us hope for the possibility of sustained, generative warmth in our own lives, no matter how bleak and despairing the present may seem.

The works' cacophonous compositions, unpredictable asymmetries, and psychedelic shifts in scale give voice to our fever-pitch anger over what has been done to and on the land of this continent during the past five hundred years. You can feel the weight of lynchings and the catastrophe of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island as vividly as you can hear birds in a thicket or smell cherry blossoms. These paintings are delight. They are fury. They are honest.

Although Fader's vision is singular - seriously, who else is painting like this? - her work has graciously invited much of the art-historical pantheon to dinner. She synthesizes Matisse's Le Bonheur de vivre, the poetics of Arthur Dove and Paul Klee, the American Regionalism of Thomas Hart Benton, the Surrealism of Max Ernst, the American folk tradition of Edward Hicks's The Peaceable Kingdom, Persian miniatures, Charles Burchfield, the mysticism of Albert Pinkham Ryder, the all-over compositions of Jackson Pollock, and the theatrics of The Wizard of Oz. There are also echoes of El Greco's View of Toledo, Sienese altarpieces, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Hieronymus Bosch, Sumerian chimeras, Kandinsky, Fairfield Porter, and the whimsical eclecticism of Odilon Redon and Pierre Bonnard, to name only a few.

Fader's own song rises unmistakably above the fray, but the echoes of these predecessors imbue her canvases with familiarity and a sense of welcome within what initially appears to be a deliberately disordered, disorienting kaleidoscopic realm.

What is also quietly revolutionary about Fader's role in this conversation is her position as a woman working within the historically male-dominated genre of landscape painting. Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, Faith Ringgold, Ana Mendieta, Barbara Kreuger, Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Leonora Carrington and Yayoi Kusama all transformed modern art, but landscape was not, for most of them, the primary arena of sustained meditation.  It was for the all-boys club of Cezanne, Claude Lorrain, Bierstadt, Canaletto, and Jacob van Ruisdael.

Ascension," Oil on Canvas, 54x48,  2026.

Into this gendered, heteronormative tradition, Fader introduces nonconforming, unrestrained heroines - not as objects of delectation, but as agents of movement and musicality. In Blue Lady, turquoise buttocks and a shoulder stride through reds and indigos. In Ascension, a redheaded angel sounds a clarion call to a cloaked central figure who is part Virgin Mary, part Cruella de Vil. At a moment of creeping authoritarianism and ecological fascism, these canvases seem to ask: What does it mean for a woman to picture herself in a state of complete, ecstatic liberation?

 Perhaps the standout work in the elegant second-floor walk-up gallery on Main Street, just uphill from the Ohio River, is Double Talk. Here, fiery oranges illuminate a herd of cartoonish dogs inside bubble-like mountains. Above a lake at sunset, a bevy of one-legged cyclopes serve as shepherds along a ridge, while leafless deciduous trees strain toward verticality. Has a meteor strike just ended organic life on this planet? Or are we all parading toward the glow of the campfire within each of us?

Double Talk, Oil on Canvas, 52x54" 2026

Come.  See. And, determine for yourself at this must-see exhibition.

Exhibition Dates: June 21-August 30, 2026

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Laurie Fader is an American painter and educator (Pratt, MICA, KyCAD) whose work blends narrative, surreal, and abstract elements to explore ecological crisis, myth, and the human condition. She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art (1985) and a BS from New York University (1983) and is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner and Gottlieb awards.  Faderhas attended Macdowell Colony and Roswell RAIR, and is included in many major corporate, private and museum collections nationally.

MOREMEN GALLERY, a contemporary art gallery, located in downtown Louisville, was founded by art enthusiast and collector Susan Moremen. The gallery’s focus is a continually evolving selection of contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists. Inquire at 502-727-3909 or moremengallery710@gmail.com