New York Studio School is proud to present the 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition, curated by Dean Kaitlin McDonough and Karen Wilkin. The first and second floors of the School will be transformed into exhibition spaces to showcase new bodies of work from our graduates.

2025 MFA GRADUATES

Eve Aaron
Neyla Arnas
Irit Baniel
Leah Brown
Ron Chen
Marie-Chloé Duval
Yael Herzog
Zana Naveed
Dejana Pupovac
Thomas Spackman
Leon Toro
Merewyn Wirth
Amelia Wykes

Eve Aaron

My paintings explore the human connection to landscape within contemporary society. I construct space through a combination of natural and industrial forms, blurring the lines between the organic and the man-made and seeking to better understand the environmental and spiritual significance of man’s relationship with the natural world.

With a consideration of the digital influence on human perception and orientation within landscape, I create work from observing both the material and virtual worlds, working often from photography and digital 360-degree maps.

Through this focus on industrial and digital subject matter, I embrace the mundane elements of landscape and seek to elevate that which is peripheral, everyday, and overlooked in order to bring into question received concepts of beauty

Neyla Arnas

My paintings emerge from things that capture my interest, that make me stop and look twice, things from which I cannot turn my eye. I paint what I observe, sometimes rearranging what I see into new kinds of color and shape relationships. I am drawn to what it means to really see things, to focus my gaze on what is readily there and yet not readily apparent, and to convey that perception in paint.

Irit Baniel

I am interested in exploring the people dearest to me, including my family and friends. Spending time with them in my studio deepens my understanding of who they are, our relationships, and our shared history.

This exploration’s emotional content is decompressed and characterized by a relentless investigation, seeking new formal ideas and inviting the process to take over.

Leah Brown

I work with charcoal, beeswax, paper, plants, and found items to make sculptures and drawings. Direct interaction with materials is essential because I rely on an intuitive and visceral sensing of form, moving between the internal sensations of my own body and what is felt from the created object. My questions concern the fluid and porous experience of self and the threshold between real, imagined, memory, and dream.

Ron Chen

In my work with drawing, painting, and set-making, I reflect on the phenomenon of The Image as an artificial entertaining spectacle, providing a temporary gateway for one’s presence to transcend time and place.

Inspired by the explicit drama of Baroque and Rococo painting, I treat my pictorial space as a stage and the subjects in my paintings as performers. This allows me to bring self-awareness into my subjects and make the act of image-making a central subject in my work. By making farcical acts and settings, I contemplate a contemporary absurd condition of being restlessly shifting between producing and viewing images. The stage is a defined place where a person becomes a character, wearing an image of someone else. This act of manipulation – reveals the palpability of the image.

I am fascinated by the possibility of becoming another person or being in another place through the image. Its relation to the human body is both internal and external. through my own anxieties, fears, desires, and longings, as an artist in the world today.

Marie-Chloé Duval

My oil paintings explore societal constructs, balancing isolation, individualism, and the tension between decay and resilience. Rooted in criminology and sociology, my work examines the structures that define and confine us, revealing the clash between collective identity and autonomy.

Blending figuration and abstraction, I depict fragmented figures and symbols of a society in flux. Weathered textures and muted tones evoke decay, while luminous colors and organic shapes suggest hope. Urban relics, organic forms, and abstract patterns serve as metaphors for modern existence, inviting reflection on our fast-paced, hyper-individualized world.

Ultimately, my work sparks dialogue on isolation, connection, and renewal—challenging us to rethink the systems that shape us.

Yael Herzog

Through my paintings and sculptures, I try to depict the feeling of being in a body. My work is largely figurative, and is involved with the point at which abstract and representational forms meet. Using oil paints, clay, and plaster, I aim for my work to hold a sense of time, depicting the process of searching, making, and undoing.

Zana Naveed

My paintings are heavily informed by my experience of landscape. I primarily utilize wood as a substrate and oil as a medium. Building on a foundation of perception, I seek to analyze the space we occupy through visual rhythm. While observing, I seek various structures and colors, from harmonious melodies to brash cacophonies. Once I return to the studio, I begin working on paintings inspired by the observations. I start by emphasizing and muting elements, such as observed shapes and contrasts, and then use color and physical brush strokes to respond to the painting as its own entity.

Dejana Pupovac

Sculpture starts as one thing to become another. I build from basic human constructions such as steps and slabs and depart from these forms in order to bridge the division between intimate and vast. Thinking of nature and man-made passages inside the landscape, I approach sculpture as an attempt to capture an interval of time, in material, in ritual, in body.

Thomas Spackman

I paint repast, the preparation and the aftermath. I paint social drinking and the debauchery that follows, inviting the viewer to feast and imbibe with my subjects. I paint in between the places in my life that I cherish: compositions cultivated from tables of cocktails and food; from laughter and raised eyebrows and from the stillness thereafter. These scenes of the mundane, community and celebration are my attempts to accentuate moments that bring people together. I ask the viewer to cherish those times, places and people in their own lives.

Leon Toro

My art explores the interaction of atmosphere and light through figurative and landscape images. Endeavoring for a sense of how the light pervades the air, the sense of volume in space as we experience it. Natural light is most significant in conveying its impermanence and perception of time. Alternatively tenebrosity takes precedence in the work to reflect the ambiguity and uncertainty of sight. Gloom motivate these images as a reflection to the environment of Connecticut where I was raised, which is shrouded in trees and nature. Luminosity there is heavily refracted by its natural elements, daylight seemingly shortened underneath the canopy and terrain. My work explores this natural phenomena as I perceive it and how it relates to my memory.

Merewyn Wirth

I am an oil painter and sculptor. My work navigates my own tenuous grasp on what it means to be tied to place. In my painting, I am investigating the absence of the body through the abstraction of faint memory and imagination of uninhabited architecture and interior spaces. Brushmark and atmospheric light coincide to create spatial structure. Place becomes exalted, outside the boundary of the skin.

My sculpture, specifically relief, is a physical manifestation of that practice. Through internal pressure and linear relational depth, I am concerned with the form-object as sacred. In both painting and sculpture, how spirit resides regardless of the interaction of human embodiment.

Amelia Wykes

I paint places that surround me. While these locations are personal to me, my emphasis lies in the act of painting itself. The feeling of a space becomes primary when the individual objects within it lose their names. These items become light, shape, and color, capturing a moment and a relationship rather than a series of recognizable objects. After the eyes see, but before the brain explains, my perception of a three-dimensional space can be captured in paint.

Installation Views