{"title":"Under $1000","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"dietrich-schuchardt-steine","title":"Steine","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eDietrich Schuchardt was born on February 14th, 1945 — the same day the British Air Force destroyed Dresden. His pregnant mother had fled their home in eastern Germany ahead of the advancing Russian army, arriving with hundreds of other women and refugees to an overcrowded hospital on the island of Rügen. The obstetrician warned her the newborn could not survive the brutal winter. She refused to leave him. He survived. And he grew up to spend his life making art about the cycles of destruction and renewal, about the thing that persists after devastation, about what remains when everything else has been stripped away.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt is not a coincidence that his subject is stones.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eSteine\u003c\/em\u003e was made in 1977, when Schuchardt was thirty-two and already deep into the practice that would define his career. He worked in an almost extinct tradition: engraving copper plates by hand with an antique phonograph needle, a single composition taking well over one hundred hours to complete. After the engraving, the plate was treated in an acid bath, inked, and printed — yielding black and white impressions pulled one at a time. Then, in a tradition that virtually no other printmaker of his generation maintained, he hand-painted each impression individually in watercolor. Every print in the edition is a true original in the strictest sense. No two are alike.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis impression is numbered 4 from an edition of 30, signed by the artist. The hand-painted watercolor gives the stones a warmth and specificity that no reproduction process could produce — each mark placed by the same hand that spent a hundred hours carving the plate. Schuchardt cites Dürer, Dalí, and Max Ernst as his primary influences, and in \u003cem\u003eSteine\u003c\/em\u003e you can feel all three: the German master's precision, the surrealist's eye for strangeness in the ordinary, and the sense that what you are looking at is not just an image but an interior landscape, something the artist had to travel to in order to bring back.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe original gold metal frame holds it with quiet authority. The toning to the sheet is light and even — the warmth of nearly fifty years, fitting for a work about what endures.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Dietrich Schuchardt","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44844997869602,"sku":null,"price":850.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/2026_GA_Inventory_ECOM_DietrichSchuchardt_STeine_Hand-ColoredEtching_002_RT_WEB_9cc8d595-dde0-428f-a0ae-22ceeea6dcd6.jpg?v=1771443030"},{"product_id":"jill-reese-portrait-of-a-woman","title":"Portrait of a Woman","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eThere is a specific visual language in 19th century American folk portraiture that is immediately recognizable once you've spent time with it — the sweeping red curtain pulled to one side, the lace collar at the throat, the botanical held at center as both object and symbol, the subject looking directly out at you with a calm that reads less like composure and more like certainty. It is a formal language built on convention, but in the hands of the artists who understood it, those conventions carried genuine weight. Susan Catherine Waters painted it. Ammi Phillips painted it. Erastus Salisbury Field painted it. The tradition is real and it is serious.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the late 20th centrury, Jill Reese painted it too. Oil on canvas, signing her name to the lower right - she painted it not as parody or pastiche but as someone who had looked long and hard at these works and wanted to live inside their logic for a while. The red curtain is there. The lace collar is there. The rose held in the subject's hands is there. The gaze is there, level and unhurried, the kind of stillness that the best portraits in this tradition carry without explanation. She understood the grammar well enough to speak it fluently.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWho Jill Reese was beyond this canvas, I cannot tell you. No documented exhibition history, no biographical record I've been able to locate. What I can tell you is that the painting is confident, the reference is intentional, and the craquelure across the surface has given it an age that suits it perfectly — as though the work has quietly decided to become the thing it was always in conversation with.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Jill Reese","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44855902634018,"sku":null,"price":350.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/2026_GA_Inventory_ECOM_JillReese_PortraitOFAWoman_OilPainting_004_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1771610050"},{"product_id":"larry-rohlfing-tree-full-moon","title":"Tree \u0026 Full Moon","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eI may not be able to tell you much about who Larry Rohlfing was, there is no auction record, no gallery biography, no exhibition history I can find. What I can tell you is that he was Ohio-based, that he signed his name into the lower edge of this drawing — not beside it, not beneath it, but woven into the composition itself, as if the signature was always part of the work — and that the drawing is, without qualification, the work of a patient hand.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA single tree. A full moon behind it. And at the base of the tree, so quiet you almost miss it, the moon again — reflected in a small pool of water, the whole world compressed into that one still surface. Pen on warm paper, monochromatic ink that reads almost brown in certain light, with nothing extraneous, nothing decorative, nothing that shouldn't be there. The economy of the mark-making is total. The image holds.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe brown mat doesn't just frame the drawing — it gives the tree the gravity its spare lines can only suggest. The warmth of the paper, the warmth of the mat, the darkness of the frame: everything in the presentation deepens what the image began. This is a piece that rewards the person who slows down in front of it. The longer you look, the more it gives back.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"gallery ATARAH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44855942250530,"sku":null,"price":600.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/2026_GA_Inventory_ECOM_LarryRohlfing_TreeandFullMoon_Drawing_012_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1771611031"},{"product_id":"lela-cooney-the-red-fiddle","title":"The Red Fiddle","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eShe dressed herself in scarves, rings, fingerless gloves, and a turban. At her neck she always wore a small framed painting made into a brooch. On afternoon walks through Covington, Kentucky, she carried her sketchbook and paints. She had studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati, graduated from the University of Kentucky, taken herself to Paris and to Mexico, and sat under Hans Hofmann — the same Hans Hofmann who shaped the entire generation of American abstract expressionists — and come back home to Kentucky and kept making work anyway. Lela Cooney was born in 1904 and died in 1995 at the age of 91, and the word her obituary used to describe her was not \"painter\" or \"teacher\" — it was that she \"carried contagious optimism.\"\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Red Fiddle\u003c\/em\u003e is marker on paper, signed, dated 1960, and it has the quality of someone who knows exactly what she is doing and has stopped trying to prove it. The fiddle doesn't emerge from a defined outline — it emerges from layered mark-making, color and line building the form together, the whole composition carrying a rhythm that makes the subject feel less like an object and more like a sound. This is what Hofmann's influence sounds like when it has been fully absorbed and made personal: not an academic exercise in abstraction but a piece of music rendered in marker, loose and confident and alive.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCooney worked as Art Director for Covington Public Schools and later at Baker-Hunt, teaching children and adults for decades. Her paintings appeared at the Cincinnati Art Museum. A piece she made of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir — described as a dramatic interpretation of powerful music in surges of blue and yellow — hung for years in the Kentucky Post building. She was regional in her life and entirely uncontained in her vision.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is an original work on paper in its original frame and mat, reset with new Museum Tru Vue glass. Some fading to marker pigment consistent with age, minimal mat burn, light wear to the frame — all of it expected, none of it diminishing. The fading is sixty years of existing in the world. The work is still louder than the room.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lela Cooney","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44855989567522,"sku":null,"price":800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/2026_GA_Inventory_ECOM_LelaCooney_TheRedFiddle_MarkerDrawing_1960_002_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1771611459"},{"product_id":"unknown-master-godslay","title":"Master Godslay","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eThe name on the back of this piece is all we have — two words written in an old hand: \u003cem\u003eMaster Godslay\u003c\/em\u003e. In 18th and 19th century British and European portraiture, \"Master\" was the formal honorific given to young boys of rank, which tells us something about who he was, even if everything else has been lost. The painter is unknown. The source is unknown. What remains is the boy's name, his face, and this extraordinary frame.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe print itself is thin and delicate — light paper, no plate marks, no text — consistent with a lithograph pulled from a 19th century book or folio. Illustrated compendiums, peerage records, biographical histories: these were the vehicles through which portraits of aristocratic families traveled in the 1800s, reproduced and bound and eventually separated from whatever context gave them their original meaning. This one was separated long ago, but someone, at some point, decided it was worth keeping — and thus put it in one of the most serious frames they could find.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd though the pictured young boy is wonderfully portrayed, the frame was originally the main reason I collected it. It is florentine carved gilt, cream and gold, with a depth and layered construction that you rarely encounter — the wood built up in tiers, each edge carved and gilded, the whole surround projecting forward with a confidence that borders on architectural. It is not decorative in the way that most ornate frames are, it is structural, deliberate, the kind of object that was made to matter. The portrait inside — the young boy in a ruffled collar, rendered in the soft atmospheric manner of 18th century English portraiture, in the tradition of Romney, Gainsborough, and Hoppner — is beautiful and quietly mysterious. But it is the frame that announces the piece from across a room.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe fading and craquelure are consistent with genuine age. The mystery is not a gap — it is part of what the collector inherits. The drama of this piece will outlive us all, something I smile at knowing.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Unknown Master","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44856137416738,"sku":null,"price":950.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/2026_GA_Inventory_ECOM_Master_Godslay_003_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1771617331"},{"product_id":"unknown-a-happy-child","title":"A Happy Child","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eAmerican folk portraiture has always struck me as one of the more quietly dramatic traditions in the history of painting — the frontality, the formality, the slightly unreal quality of the figures, children rendered with a gravity that belongs to adults. There is something genuinely strange and wonderful about it, and this piece has that quality in full. She stands at the center of the frame with complete self-possession: her yellow dress, coral beads, a pull-horse at her side, a dreamlike landscape dissolving behind her. The painter — whoever made the original, and whoever reproduced it here — understood that a child depicted this way becomes somehow timeless. Not a portrait of a specific girl but of childhood itself, held still.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is a late 20th century offset lithograph after the 19th century American folk tradition, honestly presented as such and priced accordingly. It came to me having already lived a life — an old gallery label still on the verso from Town Center Gallery in Novi, Michigan tells you it has been considered, framed, and loved before. The presentation is careful: deep forest green mat, cream liner, dark wood frame. It arrived ready to hang and has been ready ever since.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI chose it because it made me smile. It has a cheeky lightness to it that I think is genuinely useful — the kind of piece that holds its own on an empty wall, adds levity to a serious collection, or brings something warm into a dark corner.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44856230871074,"sku":null,"price":500.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/2026_GA_Inventory_ECOM_PlayfulYoungGirlinYellowDress_OffsetLithograph_019_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1771617794"},{"product_id":"rhoda-staley-florals-black-white","title":"Florals Black \u0026 White","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eThere is a particular joy that lives in this piece, and I like to think it was put there intentionally. Rhoda Staley was a Long Island artist, exhibiting in curated group shows in the late 1970s alongside other serious makers — but beyond that, the record of her life is sparse., though the power in her work is not.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e \u003cbr\u003eThe blooms are simultaneously in focus and out of it; full and present, held together by confident gesture, and yet dissolving at their edges. That is the watercolor doing what only watercolor can do — that particular bleed from tone to tone, that soft gradation that cannot be forced or faked, only coaxed. The contrast is stark on paper but warm in person, the blacks rich with warmth rather than cold, the neutral ground of the sheet deepened by age into something almost sun kissed. The mat carries that warmth further; the toning of time has made it precious rather than diminished it.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe frame is original — thin, delicate, black with faint gold detailing — and it does something unexpected: it makes both itself and the work feel bolder for the pairing. Something about the restraint of it. The whole thing holds together the way quiet things sometimes do, with more authority than you expect.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRhoda Staley is not a household name, and though the record of her life is thin - this piece, and a handful of others in the same idiom, show her committed hand, and love for flowers rendered at the edge of abstraction. I like to imagine her painting this with a smile on her face, knowing the joy it would carry forward.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"gallery ATARAH","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44856234508322,"sku":null,"price":800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/2026_GA_Inventory_ECOM_RhodaStaley_Floral_Watercolor_BW_005_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1771618290"},{"product_id":"atarah-atkinson-untitled","title":"Untitled","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eIn one of the quiet back rooms of the Villa Farnesina, I came across a corner where every layer that had ever existed on the walls was in the process of being stripped away — wallpaper, paint, plaster, all of it peeling back simultaneously, as though the building itself was being asked to shed everything it had accumulated and return to something more honest. I pointed my lens upward into the corner where the two walls met, drawn in by the darkness of it, the depth of it, the way the colors that emerged from underneath were so unexpected.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat the stripping revealed was rich and moody — deep reds and burgundies showing through in patterns and designs, the layers beneath the surface bearing a warmth that the finished walls above them never had. It reminded me not of ruin but of anatomy, the inner workings of the building's body made suddenly visible, its circulatory system exposed — intimate and vital, the way a body is when you see beneath its skin.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is what buildings hold inside themselves, underneath all the careful finishing. Not emptiness. Something alive, something that has been there all along, waiting to be seen.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atarah Atkinson","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44857385091106,"sku":null,"price":1000.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/20250816_BRIGHT_RUIN_INSTALL_SINGLE-Hanging_093_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1772054041"},{"product_id":"atarah-atkinson-foundational-1","title":"Foundational","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eThe Villa Farnesina drew me back into its quieter rooms — the ones that exist without ceremony, away from the frescoed halls that draw the crowds — and it was there that I would find what I was looking for. In one of these undecorated spaces, I came across a section of ornate plasterwork molding at the edge of a wall ceiling — its surface split by a large crack running through it, with smaller ones branching off around it, tracing paths through every carefully wrought curve like veins beneath skin, the foundational elements of the wall in quiet dispute with themselves. I photographed it as close as I could, the crack in the wall becoming the canyon of curiosity and history I longed to dive into.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe cracks run through the molding in ways that follow neither the original design nor any obvious logic — the surface splitting quietly from within while the overall structure continues to hold its shape. It is not collapsing. It is simply revealing, slowly and without drama, what accumulates inside the most carefully finished things over time.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eFoundational\u003c\/em\u003e names what we build our lives upon — the elaborate care we put into constructing something that feels solid and complete. The cracks don't announce themselves. They accumulate slowly, running through the most carefully finished parts of what we've made, until the damage is too present to overlook.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atarah Atkinson","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44857385484322,"sku":null,"price":650.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/20250816_BRIGHT_RUIN_INSTALL_SINGLE-Hanging_086_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1772053952"},{"product_id":"atarah-atkinson-cherubs","title":"Cherubs","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003ePalazzo Barberini was the first museum I visited on my trip to Rome, and this ceiling was one of the first painted ceilings I stood beneath in that city. It was a small entrance room, and the fresco was minimal — soft, faint pastel cloud strokes dissolving toward the edges — but at the center, a cluster of cherubs held aloft the Barberini family's bee medallion as though presenting it to whoever walked beneath. I tilted my lens upward and photographed it on 35mm film, thanking the cherubs for their gift.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere is something so deliberately gentle about the vision — dainty, whimsical, an offering of peace. And yet standing in Rome, in a city that has survived invasion, collapse, and reinvention more times than any one civilization should have to, the gesture reads differently. These cherubs have been holding that medallion up through all of it, suspended in their soft clouds above centuries of everything peace is not. Their smiles lie but at the same time tell the only truth they knew — what they believed in was worth fighting for.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eCherubs\u003c\/em\u003e is an archival giclée print held in a contemporary black wood frame with gold accents — the gold a quiet echo of the fresco's warm amber tones, the black grounding something that might otherwise float away entirely.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atarah Atkinson","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44857386303522,"sku":null,"price":650.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/20250816_BRIGHT_RUIN_INSTALL_SINGLE-Hanging_084_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1772053845"},{"product_id":"atarah-atkinson-gaurdians","title":"Guardians","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eSan Carlo alle Quattro Fontane is one of Rome's most astonishing pieces of architecture — a baroque church designed by Francesco Borromini between 1638 and 1667, its undulating facade carved with figures, niches, and sculptural drama all compressed into a space so small it is nicknamed San Carlino. Standing in front of it feels less like looking at a building and more like being looked at by one.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs I stood below these carved life size angels, what stopped me at first was not the figures themselves but what they were holding between them. A large circular medallion, central to the composition, flanked on either side by stone guardians whose entire posture and purpose is directed toward it. It is empty. Whatever it once held — or was always meant to hold — is not there. And yet they remain, arms raised, attending to the absence with the same devotion they would give to anything precious.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eGuardians\u003c\/em\u003e turns on that quiet persistence — the human need to place protective figures at the edges of our lives, and build watchfulness into the very architecture of how we move through the world. What we guard against shifts. What we guard over sometimes disappears entirely. The impulse to uphold the duty does not.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atarah Atkinson","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44857386532898,"sku":null,"price":650.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/20250816_BRIGHT_RUIN_INSTALL_SINGLE-Hanging_079_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1772053759"},{"product_id":"atarah-atkinson-untitled-1","title":"Untitled","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003ePalazzo Barberini is one of Rome's great baroque palaces, its halls filled with centuries of accumulated art and drama. But nothing quite prepared me for the moment I turned a corner and found myself standing in front of her —\u003cem\u003e La Velata, the Vestal Virgin Tuccia,\u003c\/em\u003e carved in marble in 1743 by the Venetian sculptor Antonio Corradini and never moved from this place since. She has been here for nearly three hundred years.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI stood in front of her, working my mind around what I was looking at — Corradini's technical achievement is almost impossible to rationalize. The veil is marble, the same marble as the face beneath it, and yet it behaves like fabric, clinging and translucent, every feature of her face perfectly visible through it. But what struck me most was not the technique. It was her. The way she holds herself. The veil does not feel imposed — it feels chosen. Like a shield she has drawn around herself, deliberate and dignified, marble made soft in service of her own protection.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI photographed her from the shoulders up, in portrait — close enough to feel the intimacy of that choice. The archival giclée print is held in a large dark contemporary metal frame that surrounds the image in depth, the figure emerging from the darkness of the frame, luminous and warm — the stone alive against all that surrounding weight.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atarah Atkinson","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44857387057186,"sku":null,"price":800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/20250816_BRIGHT_RUIN_INSTALL_SINGLE-Hanging_047_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1772053683"},{"product_id":"ancient-seams","title":"Ancient Seams","description":"\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eThe Villa Farnesina is one of Rome's great Renaissance landmarks, its principal rooms covered in frescoes by Raphael that draw visitors from around the world. I moved through those manicured rooms and instead kept going, into the quieter spaces further back — the undecorated rooms that exist in the shadow of all that grandeur — and it was there that I found what I was actually looking for.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSigns of the past, moments of transition, proof of life; a section of the original damask wallpaper had begun to peel away from the wall beneath it, revealing layers of paint, plaster, what might be wood, all of it cracked, marked, and stained with time — there was even a small stripe of blue appearing almost like an accidental signature in the exposed surface. I photographed with my Hasselblad using my macro lens, trying to preserve as much detail to the 120 film as possible — I wanted to be sure I caught the feeling of the walls shedding its skin.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eAncient Seams \u003c\/em\u003eis an archival giclée print held in a lacquered black contemporary wood frame whose angular edges catch the light and direct the eye inward — the frame itself pointing you toward the image, toward the seam, toward the place where things come apart and show you what they were always made of underneath.The seam is where breakdown begins, and also where the most honest information lives.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis piece is part of Bright Ruin (2025), my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atarah Atkinson","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44857388892194,"sku":null,"price":800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/20250816_BRIGHT_RUIN_INSTALL_SINGLE-Hanging_044_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1772053576"},{"product_id":"atarah-atkinson-by-any-means","title":"By Any Means","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cmeta charset=\"utf-8\"\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003eHere on a Roman street, a plant unbothered by the conditions it found itself in, has grown from the cracks of its marble home. When I came upon it, I chose to stop and bear witness to its perseverance, then capture it on 120mm film with my Hasselblad, because it felt less like a discovery and more like a reminder.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cem\u003eBy Any Means \u003c\/em\u003eis an archival giclée print from that encounter, held in a thick black wood frame that I chose for the way its clean angular weight gives the image room to breathe without softening what it's saying. The contrast is intentional — the rigidity of the frame, the rigidity of the marble, all holding the delicate nature growing through both of them anyway.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis is not a photograph about struggle. It's a photograph about what happens after you stop fighting your circumstances and simply begin to grow within them.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan data-sheets-root=\"1\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis piece is part of Bright Ruin, my series of over 45 unique works shot entirely on analog film over the course of 10 days in Rome, and first exhibited at Gallery ATARAH in September 2025. Learn more about the series here - Bright Ruin by Atarah Atkinson\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Atarah Atkinson","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44857400983586,"sku":null,"price":800.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0809\/6959\/6962\/files\/20250816_BRIGHT_RUIN_INSTALL_SINGLE-Hanging_090_RT_WEB.jpg?v=1772052733"}],"url":"https:\/\/galleryatarah.com\/collections\/under-1000.oembed","provider":"gallery ATARAH","version":"1.0","type":"link"}