Anne Wehrley Björk: Story Tellers
Opening reception | Thursday 10 September, 6 – 8pm
Edel Assanti is pleased to present Story Tellers – an exhibition of new paintings by Anne Wehrley Björk. Drawing on the site of Chaco Canyon in remote northwestern New Mexico, US, these enigmatic abstract compositions investigate the physical, spatial and psychological conditions of the desert landscape and architectural language that has profoundly shaped Björk’s life and practice.
Born in Farmington, New Mexico, in 1948, Björk has returned to nearby Chaco Canyon – a site of significance for the indigenous Chaco Culture between 850 and 1250 C.E., and one of the largest and most sophisticated pre-Columbian complexes in North America – repeatedly over the last five decades. Rendered in earthy, vivid colour, the forms in Björk’s paintings take this canyon as a point of departure, evoking brilliant, blazing sunlight, extreme temperatures, and the surreality of traversing an unforgiving landscape which, nonetheless, teems with life.
In the late 1970s Björk enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts programme at the University of New Mexico. This became an important gathering-place for artists seeking to develop their work by engaging with the New Mexico desert, including local artists Raymond Johnson and Richard Diebenkorn, as well as Björk’s contemporaries Emmi Whitehorse and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who were simultaneously adopting abstraction as a strategy to communicate indigeneity and a sense of place. Björk was profoundly influenced by her time there, and perhaps most significantly so by her fellow UNM alum and lecturer Agnes Martin's practice of transcendental non-thinking; not thought, and not the effort to suppress thought, but something prior to or beneath both.
Like shadows of shadows, Björk’s painterly marks transmute and reform themselves within a single composition. In one work, a rust-red form leaps and multiplies into a many-limbed echo of itself, rendered in velvety blue-black; in another, a small, slipper-pink curl sits adjacent to a sweeping arch made up of linked, mineral-coloured shapes. These associative, gestural expressions – of climate, touch, sudden movement, vastness – seek to convey Björk’s experience of moving through the landscape, and the emotional impact of a place as it transforms over time.
About the artist
Anne Wehrley Björk (b. 1948, New Mexico, USA) lives and works between Charleston, South Carolina and Lexington, Kentucky. During her graduate studies at the University of New Mexico, she trained with Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Emmi Whitehorse, Agnes Martin, Joan Brown, Susan Rothenberg, and Deborah Butterfield, fellow women artists similarly drawn to the atmospheric quality specific to New Mexico, who encouraged her practice. Her commitment to the forms of Chaco Canyon – its distinctive architectural interventions, inscribed petroglyphs, and adobe structures – has been consistent throughout, a constant in a career underpinned by a thorough investigation of light, color, and form.
Björk has shown across the United States regularly for the last forty years, most notably at Margot Samel Gallery, New York, NY, USA (2026); Fernberger Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, USA (2024, 2025, forthcoming 2027); Ross+Kramer Gallery, East Hampton, NY, USA (2020); Mary Bell Gallery, Chicago, IL, USA (group exhibitions regularly throughout 1991–2005), and at the Lexington Art League, Lexington, KY, USA (2009). Her work is in the public collection of the Fine Arts Museum at the University of New Mexico, as well as the Corporate Collection at Sears Tower in Chicago, IL.
For any press enquiries, please email Ella Lewis-Williams (ella@edelassanti.com).
Anne Wehrley Björk, Coyote Watching, 2026. Acrylic on canvas, 137.2 x 193 cm, 54 x 76 in. © Anne Wehrley Björk. Courtesy the artist and Von Rudebeck Art Advisory.
