Raul De Lara and Madeline Peckenpaugh

Raul De Lara
Mis Flores / My Flowers, 2026
Bolivian rosewood, wenge, padauk, purpleheart, yellow Rosa, maple, oak, cherry, African mahogany, walnut, ash, polyx-wax
69 x 54 x 34 in. (175.3 x 137.2 x 86.4 cm.)

A deep breath taking in scenery. A slow exhale, finally at ease. A held breath in anticipation. The paintings of Madeline Peckenpaugh and sculptures of Raul De Lara, presented together, forge a scene eliciting the same visceral responses the body finds when it stands within the familiar, the unknown, or a place of longing. For their debut feature at The Armory Show 2026, the two New York-based artists turn to expressive abstraction and figurative realism respectively to capture the ways natural surroundings hold and surface deep sentiments, from personal memory to shared experiences.

Madeline Peckenpaugh
Familiar Return, 2026
oil on canvas
70 x 60 in. (177.8 x 152.4 cm.)

Madeline Peckenpaugh approaches her canvas with raw intuition, producing abstract paintings   that evoke the threshold of here and elsewhere. Informed loosely by her upbringing among Wisconsin’s expansive terrain, her works harness the impression of deep space on a flattened canvas, moving from earthly worlds within arm’s reach to distant cosmic expanses. Her paintings composite personal and collective ideas of place, yet remain ambiguous and imagined, dictated entirely by spontaneous, thoughtful mark-making. Through cycles of construction and deconstruction, she applies and wipes away paint with gloved hands, brushes, and other tools, each gesture responding to the last. At times, her striated marks form a forested foreground before a boundless background; at others, they become the abyss itself, seen from afar or from above. These shifts in vantage point disrupt identifiable features, giving way to uncanny new worlds beyond classification in time or space. By straddling the known and unknown, Peckenpaugh’s work occupies the space in between, where the futuristically primordial, the pristinely ruinous, and the hauntingly beautiful converge.

Madeline Peckenpaugh
Saltwater, 2026
oil on linen
60 x 60 in. (152.4 x 152.4 cm.)

For the paintings on view, Peckenpaugh continues her signature style with a newfound approach informed by Greece’s archaic beauty. After an artist residency on the island of Paros, she grew struck by the region’s landscape, its warm, sunlit tones and exquisite blues, and the way its ruins linger in the present, collapsing time. In Relics, geometric, rustic-red forms resembling the ruins of the Acropolis dot a hatch-marked field nestled against an iridescent stream of blue, green, and violet. In Saltwater, hints of Aegean blue peek through a dense forest of long copper reeds, while Star System’s bands of emerald and mossy green, akin to leafy dandelions and knee-high grass, graze across burnt-umber patches. Each work’s layering of color and texture presents an endless depth with a tactile immediacy laid directly ahead. In treating nature as a phenomenological experience rather than a fixed image, Peckenpaugh’s works reflect our perpetual effort to articulate the ineffability of a place.

Madeline Peckenpaugh
Aligning, 2026
oil on linen
20 x 22 in. (50.8 x 55.9 cm.)

Expressing a similar state of in-between, New York-based Mexican artist Raul De Lara imbues his playful, anthropomorphic wooden sculptures of everyday objects with personal memory and cultural heritage to foster understanding of his immigrant experience. Using traditional and contemporary woodworking techniques, he combines motifs of the domestic space with botanical forms, from chairs to cacti, to speak on belonging, nationality, and identity.

De Lara’s three featured sculptures trace his life under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, moving from two decades under his precarious legal status, to his first return to Mexico, to his future as a prospective permanent resident. Representing the first chapter is El Mesero, a cactus-throned chair tilting precariously atop a round pot. The title, meaning “the waiter,” nods to the artist’s years as a restaurant server and the labor taken up by immigrant communities, while gesturing toward the waiting for stability that often defines the DACA experience. Its containment in a flowerpot reflects De Lara’s years existing in a liminal state, living in a country where he can neither dig roots nor return to the one he left behind – a tension further carried into the sculpture’s furniture component that evokes home’s warmth and familiarity, only to be retracted by its prickly thorns.

Raul De Lara
El Mesero, 2025
basswood, hemu, oak
59 x 26 x 38 in. (149.9 x 66 x 96.5 cm.)

Marking a turning point is the wall-hanging sculpture Soft Monstera, created after De Lara’s first return to Mexico in decades. The work grew from his firsthand encounter with the plant in Mexico, a moment that affirmed at last his presence in the country of his birth. A stylized rendering of the sprawling nature he witnessed back home, Soft Monstera becomes a symbol of the artist’s roots and the new memories he carried back to the U.S.

De Lara’s newest work, Mis Flores / My Flowers, closes this trilogy with a pot of five flowers from an imagined species, bearing tufted faces and various wood species petals. Springing forward, the bouquet personifies “getting one’s flowers,” or celebrating one’s accomplishments, and gestures toward his own close prospect of permanent residency. Its material, woods from around the world, reflects the diversity of his new home in New York and the places he will now be free to travel. Where El Mesero is emblematic of De Lara’s experience under DACA, these newer pieces indicate a moment of transformation and opportunity, moving from somber reflection on what might have been to celebratory visions of a now tangible future.

Raul De Lara
Soft Monstera, 2026
walnut, polyx-wax
48 x 47 x 4 1/2 in. (121.9 x 119.4 x 11.4 cm.)

From De Lara’s crafted wooden sculptures to Peckenpaugh’s wiped canvases, the artists build uniquely imagined worlds with their own hands, each recognizing place as a powerful vessel for memory, connection, and possibility.

Madeline Peckenpaugh
To Anti Paros, 2026
oil on linen
19 x 21 in. (48.3 x 53.3 cm.)

Haley Clouser is Assistant Curator at the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art (SCAD MOA) and an independent curator and writer. At SCAD MOA, she has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Lap-See Lam: Phantom Banquet (2026), Raul De Lara: Raíces/Roots (2025), Iván Argote: The Burden of the Invisible (2024), among others. Previously, she was the Curatorial Fellow at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, where she organized exhibitions such as Rachel Hayes: Transcending Space (2023), Carolina Caycedo: Apparitions/Appariciones (2022), and Melvin Edwards: Brighter Days (2022). She also was the Curatorial Research Assistant for the landmark exhibition The Dirty South at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where she also served as the Samuel H. Kress Interpretive Fellow. She has held internships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. Her independent projects have been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts (2023) and the Andy Warhol Foundation (2022), and her writing has appeared in Burnaway, Boston Art Review, IMPACT Magazine, and elsewhere. She received her MA in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University and BA in History and Art History from George Mason University.

Raul De Lara (b. 1991, Culiacán, Sinaloa, México) received an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Studio Art from The University of Texas at Austin. He has held museum solo exhibitions at SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA and The Contemporary Austin, TX. De Lara’s work has been exhibited at Tucson Museum of Art, AZ; Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture of the Riverside Museum, CA; Reynolds Gallery, Richmond, VA; Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Wharton Esherick Museum, Paoli, PA; MINT Gallery, Munich, DE; The Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York, NY; and Institute of Contemporary Art | Maine College of Art & Design, Portland, ME. The artist has been featured in Art in America, The New York Times T Magazine, American Craft, and Interior Design, among many others. Accolades the artist has been awarded include the Maxwell/Hanrahan Award in Craft, The Hopper Prize Shortlist, NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Craft/Sculpture, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Fellowship, and Luminarts Fellowship Finalist. He lives and works in New York City.

Madeline Peckenpaugh (b. 1991, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) received an MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Peckenpaugh’s work has been exhibited at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Bremond Capela, Paris, FR; Perrotin, Paris, FR; 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; F2T Gallery, Milan, IT; Andrew Reed Gallery, Miami, FL; PM/AM Gallery, London, UK; COMA, Sydney, Australia; and The Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence, RI; among others. She has a forthcoming solo show at the Centre International D’art et Du Paysage in Vassivière Island, FR. Her work is included in the public collections of the New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; Female Artists of Mougins Museum (FAMM), Mougins, France; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Brown University, Providence, RI; and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Peckenpaugh lives and works in Queens, NY.