Structure and Stricture: Paula Henderson
Atlanta, Georgia — Johnson Lowe Gallery is pleased to present Structure and Stricture, our first solo exhibition of works by Paula Henderson, a Massachusetts-born, Atlanta-based artist. Opening Friday, July 18, the exhibition focuses on a breadth of works by Henderson spanning the past two decades, including recent works never seen before.
Paula Henderson doesn’t paint answers. She probes and renders conditions—structures in collapse, memory held in delay, identity rendered as a process constantly unfolding. Her debut at Johnson Lowe Gallery, opening July 18th, revisits a period shaped by proximity and lived experience. From 1998 to 2002, she taught in Chicago’s public schools, working with students living in the shadows of the Robert Taylor Homes. These buildings—monuments to mid-century social planning and its slow unraveling—echoed through her students’ lives, informing Henderson’s early realist paintings. These were acts of witness: precise, emotionally charged studies of architecture at its limits, rendered with forensic tenderness, each structure carrying the imprint of a social wound.
In the classroom and the neighborhood, Henderson closely observed how identity is assigned and reinforced. Boys were framed through force; girls through the expectations of grace, beauty, and comportment. The body, in her work, holds both surface and story. From these early encounters, she developed a kind of practiced attention—focused on how people construct inner frameworks when the world around them proves unstable. Her abstraction gathers these elements—gesture, memory, structure—into a visual rhythm that holds presence. Space becomes an active trace of those who once moved through it.
Henderson’s schematic paintings explore mapping as an embodied practice. Her diagrams and systems hold tension in their lines, each mark registering lived experience. The work leans toward elegy—fragile, deliberate, grounded in the physical world. In her later paintings, the basketball court appears frequently, reimagined as both a spatial system and a stage. Each composition unfolds as choreography, where repetition and regulation intersect with aspiration, over and over again. These works carry formal precision and emotional charge, using a sacred modular geometry to translate movement shaped by constraint.
In her most recent paintings, Henderson composes through rhythm and variation. Bodies emerge through motion—silhouettes that drift, collide, repeat—abstractions rooted in movement, memory, and edge. Earlier works sought pattern in the world; these create their own, shaped by internal logic, intuition, and architectural memory. The body exists as structure—embedded in each interval and curve. Coherence accumulates through layering, restraint, and design.
Throughout, Henderson traces hidden diagrams—emotional, architectural, cultural—allowing each work to become a kind of map: not of land, but of experience. Sensitive to the whispers beneath demolition, beneath movement, beneath the gloss of image, her work asks us to attune ourselves to what structures us—and what, too quietly, we inherit.
