Mari Eastman: Untitled (Gray Fox), 2025

Known for her “off-hand intimacy,” Mari Eastman paints women, landscapes, animals, and flowers. Through its subject–a fox–and its small scale, this new woodblock print embodies the artist’s affinities for ambience and affect. Visually, it also draws on the artist’s distinctly brushy color application–which writer Alex Jen once characterized as a kind of painterly “traffic” on her works’ surfaces.  

Untitled (Gray Fox), emerged from Eastman’s interest in the print-based works of Edvard Munch and Japanese woodcuts, specifically Ukiyo-e prints, which depict the fleeting pleasures of everyday life in Japan. In them one might see a Kabuki actor, a beautiful woman, or a halcyon vista. Munch’s woodcuts and lithographs, however, are often moodier depictions of lovers or individuals emerging from darkness or set against the backdrop of a barren landscape. 

Over the  years, many have observed in her work nostalgia characterized by sincerity. As we emerge from the summer of 2025,  a euphoric 1990s imaginary has piqued and permeated the culture (Oasis, slip dresses, cigarettes) while political cacophony rages around us. This small fox, like many of Eastman’s artworks, offers a moment of pause and escape while still reflecting back to us something about ourselves. In its ambiance and style, and by being somehow both specific and not specific, Eastman’s subject conveys a zeitgeist without pinning it down.

This is Mari Eastman’s first print with Process/Process.