The Verve of Anne Wehrley Björk

Installation view "Anne Wehrley Björk: Lost Canyon", Margot Samel, New York

By EDWARD WAISNIS January 16, 2026

Drawn to the enigmatic New Mexico San Juan Basin Chaco Canyon where she has spent considerable time over several decades Anne Wehrley Björk* layers her encrusted canvases with personal memory and archaeological resonance from that gathering place of the ancient Navajo.

Beginning from slathered buttery fields of a off-white hue Björk overlays interlocked bands of black (at times infused with Prussian blue and/or chocolate browns) that the artist refers to as ‘bones’. The tarriness might just as easily connote oozing sedimentation cracking the surface of the desert landscape as it bubbles to the surface.

Additionally, Björk’s pigmented crags bear resemblance to Clifford Still’s knifed strata. Yet, they are set apart through the reveal of playful figures intermingled. More correctly, near-figures in that the crude renderings alluding to in utero adjacent transmogrification. Sharing commonality with whimsy in Bob Thompson, as well as the emergent frolicking figures and flora on Diego Giacometti’s bronze furniture and fittings. These qualities are obvious in Lost Canyon, 2025, a vertical work shivering with a colorful menagerie and lending its title to the exhibition overall.

Anne Wehrley Björk, “Lost Canyon”, 2025, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 77 inches.

The restrictions imposed on palette and composition, in their insistent sameness, built to a hum when viewing the work en masse in the context of the exhibition, that carried, as transcendence, in the individual works. Björk’s focus on terrestrial locus put her in line with the perennial painter’s painter Per Kirkeby. And, they do share similitude, but, the strongest comparisons can be made to the paintings of Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), of the 80s.

Björk’s singular fixation, bordering on didacticism, brings to mind the character Roy Neary (played by Richard Dreyfuss) from the sci-fi film Close Encounters of the Third Kind who turned to art-making skills in order to envision an (alien) implanted suggestion of a geographic location; in essence building an incremental and compulsive art practice.

Anne Wehrley Björk, “Canyon to Coast”, acrylic on canvas, 56 x 48 inches.

Canyon to Coast, 2025, harkens, with the inscribed title, to Helen Frakenthaler’s seminal Mountains and Sea of 1952. Unlike that masterpiece Björk evokes the aquatic with a bird’s-eye view of islands and continents set against a tepid sea, rather than via liquid pools of viscous pigment.

  Anne Wehrley Björk, “Dark Forest”, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 48 x 56 inches.

Dark Forest, 2024, suggest entry point to the formulating origins of this body of work, given it’s earlier place in the lineage shown in this show. Here, Björk exerts an attack that seems ‘carved’ and searching, as attested by the pentimenti.

Red Horn, another work from 2024, besides the titular relation, offers further insight in a hotly-colored constructivism worthy of Al Held.

Anne Wehrley Björk, “Red Horn”, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 56 x 48 inches.

The exhibition is in line with the gallery program's proclivity for spotlighting under-recognized artists working  beyond the center(s) of the art world [though I am not quite sure if that notion is applicable, given our fractured existence?]; what was once termed: undiscovered and outsider, respectively, by earlier generations for which they have received positive, and well-deserved, attention.

• Björk was born in Farmington, New Mexico and continues to spend time in the region while based between Charleston, SC and Lexington, KY.
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Anne Wehrley Björk: Lost Canyon
Margot Samel
295 Church Street, New York, NY 10013
January 10–February 14, 2026