Katya Labowe-Stoll

 Katya Labowe-Stoll paints what happens after the end. In her imagined post-flood world, time warps, bodies stretch, and inner states distort the landscapes they inhabit. A multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, Labowe-Stoll creates tender scenes in oil and wash that hover between the real and the unreal. Her work imagines how humans might evolve — biologically, emotionally, mythically — when faced with ecological collapse and spiritual disillusionment. Figures drift, dissolve, and return, shapeshifting between self and setting, delusion and revelation.

"Her bodies are becoming landscape. Her landscape is a dream. Her dream is a post-apocalypse where meaning still flowers, fragile and wet."

Labowe-Stoll’s process begins with a question: how do we narrate the world, and where do those stories fail us? Her visual language is soft and psychological, defined by transparent washes and surreal juxtapositions — apple cores float, fish peer out, clovers rise from milky waters. These symbols feel familiar but destabilized, as if inherited from a collective fable and rewired through deeply personal myth. Her interest lies in the in-between: between logic and belief, beauty and breakdown, figure and field. A RISD graduate, she uses painting as a method of speculative ecology — an attempt to render what survives, not just physically, but emotionally.

"I’m thinking about how myth mutates. What stories do we tell ourselves to survive? And what new myths form after the water recedes?"

This is the Valley introduces a spectral figure cloaked in enormous green leaves, their body caught in a moment of evolutionary pause. They are neither beast nor bloom, but something shyly alive — a whisper of future species. In Bather Finds Something Beautiful, a woman floats mid-transformation, her gaze and features gently unraveling into lily-covered water. Both works depict bodies in flux, coexisting with the elements that both threaten and sustain them. Labowe-Stoll’s palette remains soft, but her inquiries are urgent: how do we reconstruct selfhood and story from the ruins of the known?

Following Fable & Form, she continues to explore the porous threshold between human interiority and natural environments, expanding her post-flood cosmology into even more intimate and expansive terrain.

Follow Katya:Website | Instagram