Helen Garber’s intricate oil-on-canvas paintings explore notions of the transcendental, employing a visual vocabulary that draws on elements from a diverse array of iconographic systems. Garber engages in a process of layering and negating brushwork, resulting in dense, textured surfaces of patterned impasto that are neither abstracted nor representational. Drawing inspiration from Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions, Garber’s paintings evoke a remarkable blend of sources, from West African ceremonial masks to Northern Renaissance altarpieces and stained glass windows. “By decoding and repurposing the source material into the skeleton of each structure,” she has said, “a contemporary devotional figure emerges as a central mass, allowing the reference points to both meld and compete with each other.”