Carol Ladewig’s latest Painting Time: Moments series (2021-25) expands her long-standing exploration of time through modular, color-based abstractions on shaped surfaces. Her earlier Painting Time series (2011-19) used modular forms in a structured, linear fashion, arranging color-field paintings into calendar-like grids that visually recorded the regular rhythms of the year, using color to signal night and day or seasonal shifts. Her new works break free from that rigid framework, forming curling, branching, dendritic structures in intuitive, organic arrangements.

Each of these works consists of several small paintings rendered on small square, triangular, or circular boards held together with an aluminum armature. Ladewig explains; “Each panel's shape is influenced by my perceptions: an important moment is a circle, a typical one is a square, and a transition is a triangle.” 

Earlier works in the series feature images of everyday objects, a continuation of her exploration of memory. But later works have evolved into abstractions that use pointillist mark-making—sometimes applied with a brush, sometimes with a marker—to create atmospheric compositions of loose, fluid forms and linear bands that vibrate with movement and shifting depth. 

Influenced by our collective cultural experience of “COVID time,” these works reflect a divergent sense of time’s passage in a flexible, relativistic space-time. They don’t adhere to a fixed chronology but unfold through shifting visual relationships, evoking a sense of time as lived rather than measured. Ladewig’s universe of color and rhythm suggests an evolving, highly personal conception of time—not as a rigid structure, but as something cyclical, divergent, and continuously unfolding.