Gail M Boykewich

SLAG&RX is pleased to present Into the Wolf’s Mouth, Gail M Boykewich’s first exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together a new body of paintings and hand-cut sculptural assemblages, the exhibition examines the rituals, symbols, and private mythologies people construct in order to navigate uncertainty, longing, vulnerability, and transformation.

The exhibition title derives from the Italian expression in bocca al lupo, “into the wolf’s mouth”, a phrase traditionally used to wish someone luck before entering an uncertain or dangerous situation. Simultaneously ominous and protective, the idiom reflects the emotional atmosphere of Boykewich’s work: a world in which tenderness coexists with anxiety, intimacy with distance, and beauty with latent unease.

Across the exhibition, Boykewich presents imagined portraits suspended between psychological realism and allegory. Her figures emerge within lush botanical environments populated by flowers, birds, insects, cats, rabbits, and symbolic fragments that function simultaneously as decoration, emotional architecture, and talismanic protection. Neither fully narrative nor entirely symbolic, the works evoke the language of folklore, devotional imagery, magic realism, and vernacular portraiture while remaining distinctly contemporary in their emotional tenor.

Boykewich’s paintings possess an unusual visual clarity. Light in her work is neither atmospheric nor obscuring; instead, it reveals with almost devotional precision. Faces, scars, freckles, stray hairs, jewelry, leaves, and petals are rendered with meticulous attention, granting equal dignity to the human body and the natural world that surrounds it. This heightened visibility creates an unsettling psychological charge. The viewer is offered no place to hide within shadow or ambiguity; meaning resides in the surface itself, in the accumulation of details, symbols, and gestures.

The exhibition’s sculptural assemblages further complicate the relationship between painting and objecthood. Constructed from layered and hand-cut wooden forms, works such as Arcadia, Carnations, and Calliandra extend physically into space, creating shallow theatrical environments that oscillate between diorama, devotional retablo, and portrait relief. Flowers and vines appear to emerge beyond the frame itself, while figures seem suspended between distinct pictorial planes. These constructions produce a subtle spatial dislocation: the sensation that bodies, objects, and landscapes coexist intimately while remaining psychologically separate.

Throughout the exhibition, Boykewich repeatedly returns to symbols historically associated with luck, manifestation, mourning, protection, desire, fertility, and rebirth. Lotus flowers float beside submerged figures; black cats sit before rose gardens; rabbits emerge beneath lunar skies; lovers face one another across mirrored cigar boxes. Rather than functioning as fixed iconographic systems, these recurring motifs operate as emotional signals, fragments of inherited belief systems adapted to contemporary anxieties and desires.

Nature in Boykewich’s work is never merely decorative. Her paintings reflect a sustained reverence for ecological interdependence and the fragile coexistence between human beings and the natural world.
Plants, animals, and human subjects are treated with equivalent psychological presence, collapsing traditional hierarchies between observer and observed, companion and familiar, ornament and protagonist. Her fictional characters become vessels through which broader questions of care, fragility, mortality, and coexistence unfold.

While her practice draws from historical precedents ranging from folk portraiture and devotional painting to Pre-Raphaelite romanticism and contemporary magic realism, Boykewich ultimately constructs a visual language distinctly her own,  one defined by heightened illumination, emotional sincerity, handcrafted intimacy, and an uncanny sense of suspended narrative.
 

About the Artist

Gail M Boykewich is an American painter and sculptor based in the New York metropolitan area. She studied painting and sculpture at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she developed an early interest in traditional portraiture, magic realism, and folk art traditions. Her meticulously detailed works explore the interconnectedness of human, animal, and botanical life through imagined portraits and psychologically charged symbolic environments.

Boykewich’s work has been described as whimsical, tender, melancholic, and darkly humorous. Through vivid color, precise linework, and layered sculptural construction, she creates immersive worlds that celebrate the beauty of flora and fauna while reflecting on emotional vulnerability, environmental fragility, and human symbiosis with nature.

Her work has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Minneapolis, Brooklyn, Jersey City, and Miami, including presentations at Jersey City History Museum, Nimbus Arts Center, Aqua Art Miami, and Superfine Art Fair Los Angeles, among others. She is the recipient of the 2026 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship and serves as an Artist Mentor-in-Residence at Project 14C in Jersey City, NJ.

Into the Wolf’s Mouth marks Boykewich’s debut exhibition with SLAG&RX New York.