Stephanie Lucchese: Nuns fret not

Stephanie Lucchese’s debut New York solo features painted works inspired by gothic, decadent 19th-century literature, depicting sensual scenes of leisure, sexual expression, and macabre undertones. About ABRI MARS is honored to announce Nuns fret not , Stephanie Lucchese’s debut New York solo exhibition. Lucchese paints quiet yet disorienting liminal scenes with no hierarchy among the elements depicted, combining background and foreground, subject and object, light and form; where alluded headless beings are satiated by the ephemerality of all things, silently delighting in the comforts of dwelling in the dark twilight of illusive woodlands. The end of the afternoon brings with it the coldness in the death of all things that were before, and the mystery of what is yet to come. It’s an in-between space within time where the light of day dissolves into pale blue hues, and everything is swallowed by shadows, clouding the vision and causing a strange sense of longing for everything that is not there. Liminality in space is shaped by human absence, yet it can also evoke a cognitive state of transition between an old reality and a new one—an ambiguous experience marked by distress and unease, but also overflowing with fertile openness. Dusk creates a similar shifting cycle, blurring the boundaries between an unlit world and spectral dream-images, as the human eye searches the obscurity for forms trying to summon them into known figuration. Except Lucchese is not concerned with things seen, for her works reveal a sense of stillness that refuses to surrender to norms—whether from human or nature’s creation—challenging the implied discomfort brought by thresholds of subconsciousness. She materializes beauty in states of suspension and creates slumbering reflections of pleasure in metaphorical twilights. Nuns Fret Not (At their Convent’s Narrow Room) articulates the possibility of rest amid strangeness and transience, a form of reassurance in finding serenity in perpetual crepuscular liminality. William Wordsworth wrote the poem which shares the title with this solo exhibition. It is an invitation to quietude in untroubled, delightful existences, “In truth the prison, into which we doom / Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me / In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound.” Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; And hermits are contented with their cells; And students with their pensive citadels; Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom, High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells, Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells: In truth the prison, into which we doom Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me, In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground; Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be) Who have felt the weight of too much liberty, Should find brief solace there, as I have found. —William Wordsworth, Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room (1807) Curatorial text by Thais Bignardi Engstrom Opening Reception → 18 Sept 2026, 6–8pm The exhibition will be accompanied by events to be announced For further information, please contact info@abrimars.com Read more Toggle Prints Painting