Eskenazi's Mangila exhibits "Magma" at Columbia University's Neiman Gallery

Source: Columbia University School of the Arts

January 8 - February 13, 2026
Artist’s Reception, January 22, 2026

​The LeRoy Neiman Gallery is pleased to present “Magma” an exhibition featuring work by Dominic Mangila ‘07 that explores the cross-fertilization of abstraction in painting, installation and video.

To prod painting’s other, unknown sphere, Mangila explores the reconsideration of the brushstroke as a performative signature of the mind’s interiority and the individual aesthetic gesture of the body’s phenomenological sensitivity to all that is present in the painting studio. H​e transports the​ painterly swaths of oil on linen from the painting studio to a computer digital lab to a printing press to a glass fabrication shop which result in the creation of a new team of hybrid sculptures with subsequent​ corporeality. The sculptures then perform as actor-protagonists in a phantasmagoria of succession of​ televisual images in the video titled “Televisual Painterly Gestures”, held, danced and chanted with by Mangila’s husband Han and friends in various terrains and bodies of water such as Big Sur in California; New York’s Long Island; Baler, Taal Volcano and Manila Bay in the Philippines; and Mudeungsan Mountain in Gwangju, South Korea.  A video camera captures these cross-fertilized and hybridized illuminated sculptures, as they are released to the outside world to adjoin, twist and collide with nature and the man-made. ​In their abstract play of illumination, color, image and sound, the televisual hybridized forms challenge the language of description while exploring abstraction beyond the merely non-representational and formal. Also, in the exhibition, a large painting entitled “The WPS” acts a record of a painterly hand’s attempt to witness and hold an inaccessible geopolitical seabed of the contested waters of West Philippine Sea.  It features an echoing of the shamanistic gestures of the performers in the video and proposes an alternate locale to the video’s imaginings of an interplay of light, sound and gesture.