Two new painting shows at Galleri Urbane span millennia in their points of reference, from Paleolithic cave art to digital selfies. Hung in well-lit rooms so closely adjacent that a viewer can stand in the doorway between them and look from one to the other, they are compelling on their own terms, and even more so in conjunction.
Drea Cofield’s “Wish You Were Here” consists of both plein-air landscapes and painted interpretations of selfie photos sent to her by friends and strangers, while Erika Jaeggli’s “Magdalenian Suite” is the result of a residency in France’s Dordogne region, where she visited six caves decorated during the Magdalenian period between 12 and 25 millennia ago. Despite the mind-boggling antiquity of the Magdalenian caves, the experience of seeing the two shows together generates a sense of what is common in human experience from the Paleolithic to the present.
In the left-hand gallery, Cofield’s two bodies of work share a style and format; both are oils executed on 5-by-7-inch shellacked cardboard. Both the selfies and the landscapes artfully frame their central subjects with natural and architectural elements, and both (despite the attention-getting nature of the intimate selfies) use telling details of these surrounding elements to convey their larger setting.
Made during a year of travel in France and the United States, Cofield’s landscapes communicate a great deal in a small space, whether about the sky, land or sea. Although the views of mountains and seashores might inspire a degree of travel envy from viewers stuck at home in the cold winter, I was most engaged by the architectural details of cityscapes from Cofield’s home turf in Brooklyn.
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Drea Cofield’s “Night Still Life,” a 2025 oil-on-cardboard painting, depicts a man viewed through a window.
Galleri Urbane
Showing the low morning and evening light dramatically striking the cornices, fire escapes and window frames of the borough’s dense, 19th-century mid-rise buildings, her Brooklyn pictures suggestively evoke a Romantic vision of a creative lifestyle, nestled in a garret and devoted to art above all else.
Drea Cofield’s 2025 oil-on-cardboard painting “Love Hotel” shows a man taking a selfie in an ornate mirror.
Galleri Urbane
Perhaps unexpectedly, architectural and other interior details are crucial to many of the selfie pictures as well. Although the selfies center on the human form, the figures take up only a small part of the pictorial space (in contrast to the work of certain other painters). Here, the figures are visually held in place by the arrangements of frames, furniture, columns and other elements that surround them and make up a majority of the compositions.
About the selfies themselves, though, I felt more ambivalence — not so much about Cofield’s art as about the vision of the people they represent. With neither the biographical richness of traditional self-portraits, nor the purely academic aestheticism of a figure study, they seemed redolent of anonymous, transactional modes of interaction (and, indeed, OnlyFans is one of the channels by which members of the public can submit their selfies to Cofield for her consideration).
Across the hall from Cofield’s work, Jaeggli’s paintings also communicate a great deal of information at once. They show the interactions among the bulging, undulating surfaces of the cave walls and the tightly enclosed spaces they define; the way that light plays across those surfaces; as well as the outlines of animals and other shapes made by prehistoric artists. The atmosphere of the caves is close, even claustrophobic, but the sense of encountering something incomprehensibly ancient elicits a feeling of the vastness of time, described in an essay by the writer Eve Hill-Agnus as “sublimity” or “boundlessness.”
Erika Jaeggli’s 2025 oil-on-linen work “Grottes de Cougnac” depicts prehistoric cave art in France. The painting is part of Jaeggli’s “Magdalenian Suite” exhibition at Galleri Urbane in Dallas.
Galleri Urbane
In the centerpiece of the show, a 12-foot-wide triptych titled The Mind in the Cave, the boundaries between mind and matter — experience and reality — become blurred, as expressive whirls and blobs spread across the cave surface. Particularly in the paintings of the Font-de-Gaume and Cougnac caves, I sensed a similar blurring between the organic and the inorganic, as the curving walls started to seem like living things with their fleshy clefts and pendulous protrusions.
Both the curving, organic shapes of the cave walls and the earthy, reddish undertones of their colors create a feeling of connectedness to nature — a womb-like experience of being enclosed underground. At the same time, the Magdalenian animals are the kind of symbols that date back well before the beginning of written history, suggesting a pre-cultural unity between human and animal — a theme that has inspired modern painters from Picasso to Susan Rothenberg.
The thought that cave paintings result from some powerful, essential drive to depict — a basic need to make art — stayed in my mind as I went back for another look at Cofield’s selfies. With their nude, vulnerable, anonymous subjects, they respond to something similarly fundamental: what the artist calls “the quiet, human desire to not only be seen, but rendered through touch.”
Though few creators can hope to make something that lasts as long as the Magdalenian cave paintings, these basic drives — much deeper and longer-lasting than the vagaries of trend and style — are what guarantee that artistic communication can take place between any two members of the human species, from prehistory to the present.
Drea Cofield’s 2025 oil-on-cardboard painting “Fall Light (Brooklyn)” is featured in the artist’s “Wish You Were Here” exhibition at Galleri Urbane.
Galleri Urbane
Details
“Drea Cofield: Wish You Were Here” and “Erika Jaeggli: Magdalenian Suite” continue through Feb. 14 at Galleri Urbane, 2277 Monitor St., Dallas. Free. Open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and by appointment. Call 325-226-8015 or visit galleriurbane.com.
Artists Drea Cofield (left) and Erika Jaeggli are featured in exhibitions at Galleri Urbane in Dallas.
Galleri Urbane
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