Christina Attié Ballantyne, Ish Lipman, and Nour Malas
All I Want is Boundless Love

March 22 - April 19, 2025

In All I Want Is Boundless Love, Martha’s presents three artists—Christina Attié Ballantyne, Ish Lipman, and Nour Malas—who push upon the bounds of what painting can do, eschewing the traditional picture plane in favor of an emergent art that transgresses the border between pictorial space and viewer space. The viewer thus must discard any notion of boundaries that they bring to the work, accepting, instead, that these paintings will follow them, long after they leave the gallery—onto Guadalupe Street, into their cars, into their homes.

The paintings in All I Want Is Boundless Love press upon you—what love does, indeed, when allowed no bounds. Taken from a Frank O’Hara poem, “Meditations in an Emergency,” the show’s title speaks to a question many of us have now: In a state of crisis, how do we stop? And, maybe as important: What stops us?

These paintings, perhaps. As they enter our space, they offer something to us: the comfort of a paradox—transcendence and rootedness, at the same time. The paintings seem to approach the divine, the celestial, the most outer—but they do so only to envelop, to point inward, toward inner space. Indeed, Lipman’s corner paintings literally surround the viewer, filling their sight—both direct and peripheral—so that one can’t but imagine the painting continuing on, forming a full square around their head. The viscerality of Ballantyne’s work, of the feeling it evokes of being stuffed, points endlessly inward, even as it projects out. And in Malas’s paintings, one can just catch the traces of human bodies—fingers, jaws—but only if they look closely, sink into the maroon and olive expanses that house these suggestive marks.

More O’Hara: “It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.” These paintings are beautiful, and yet, in their insistence, they may appear, in a way, too urgent for an initial reaction of beauty.

But what are appearances? If they are all art has to offer, perhaps this is an emergency.

Text by Grace Sparapani

Artist Statements