Low Tide - Solo Exhibition Maria D. Rapicavoli, Curated by Mariacristina Ferraioli

Join us for the opening of Low Tide, Maria D. Rapicavoli’s solo show curated by Mariacristina Ferraioli. Work on memory, inheritance and renewal, shaped by Rockaway’s tides. Drinks to follow. About Sofy Gallery is pleased to present, as part of its curatorial program, Low Tide, a solo exhibition by the artist Maria D. Rapicavoli curated by Mariacristina Ferraioli. The show runs October 29 to November 28, 2026, at 153 10th Avenue in Chelsea, with an opening reception on Thursday, October 29, from 6 to 9 p.m. The exhibition presents an entirely new body of work ranging from large-format canvases to photographs and sculptures, marking an intense convergence of biological inheritance, cosmic rhythms and the transformation of matter. Low Tide finds its conceptual architecture in the alternation of the tides of the Atlantic Ocean along the shores of Rockaway Beach, where Rapicavoli collected some of the materials that went into the making of the works. The exhibition was conceived one year after the diagnosis of ovarian cancer and the discovery of an inherited mutation of the BRCA2 gene, passed down from her mother and associated with the development of the disease. Low tide represents that cyclical moment of maximum exposure in which what is ordinarily protected by the water is left uncovered. The exhibition reflects on this threshold of vulnerability not as loss, but as an indispensable condition for regeneration. The exhibition includes a work made by incorporating hundreds of crab molts collected along the shore. To grow, the crab must free itself of its exoskeleton, entering a phase of extreme fragility while it waits for its new shell to harden. The very etymology of the term originates in the Latin cancer and the Greek karkinos, the origin of the word carcinoma. The name recalls the myth of the crab sent by Hera against Heracles, which, after biting the hero's foot and being crushed by him, is rewarded with a place in the sky as a constellation: in this symbolic vein, the shedding of the molt becomes the tangible metaphor of a physical and psychological journey through trauma. The tension between damage and repair runs through the entire exhibition on several levels, interweaving different languages and materials. In the monumental canvases measuring two meters by two (about 6.5 by 6.5 feet), a size that recalls the approximate length of the DNA contained in a single cell if fully unwound, the artist paints her own altered cells before chemotherapy treatment. Gouache on raw canvas renders their fluid forms, transforming them into interior landscapes and maps suspended between abstraction and the living materiality of the body. This dialogue between micro- and macrocosm is echoed by a porcelain work bearing the mathematical formula of the harmonic analysis of tides h(t) = H0 + ∑i=1N Ai cos(ωit + φi) placing the gravitational pull of celestial bodies in direct relation with the movement of bodily fluids. The exhibition is further enriched by the account of the delicate discovery, on the beach, of a funerary urn containing the ashes of a woman named Rosalie: a chance point of intersection between two distinct biological and human stories, reunited by the movement of the sea, where the unknown trace brushes against personal memory. Finally, closing this temporal horizon, two analog photographs from the artist's archive introduce a fragment of life before the illness, reread today as a fundamental piece of a body of research that continually questions memory, inheritance and transformation. Expanding the scientific and astronomical research, and the research on transgenerational trauma, that characterized her previous works, Rapicavoli here extends her inquiry from psychological to biological inheritance. Low Tide asks how what is infinitely small can radically influence our lives, presenting vulnerability as a necessary passage toward the construction of a new form of resistance. Read more Toggle Painting Mixed media Sculpture Photography