A new body of paintings by Chicago-based artist Cindy Bernhard. Bernhard received her BFA from the American Academy of Art in Chicago in 2011 and her MFA from Laguna College of Art and Design in 2014. Her work explores themes of spiritual rupture, transcendence, and the relationship between the human body and the divine. At the center of her latest exhibition, “Broken Vessels”, is the metaphor of the body as a container for spirit and belief. Drawing from archetypal associations between gold and divinity, Christian mysticism and contemporary existential anxiety, Bernhard’s monumental six-foot paintings depict fractured golden forms that stand in for humanity itself—wounded, imperfect, yet still capable of transformation.

The relentless pace of the contemporary life, political extremity and collective anxiety, become invisible pressures acting upon the spirit. Yet despite this atmosphere of rupture, Bernhard’s paintings also suggest the possibility of redemption. Light, water, fire, and smoke recur throughout as symbols of purification and divine presence. Bernhard asks what remains sacred in an age defined by spectacle, consumption and fragmentation, suggesting that transcendence can still perhaps emerge through the cracks.

“Broken Vessels” is currently on display at Plato Gallery until July 11th.