Every day artist Rosa Loy rides her bicycle 10 kilometers through Leipzig from her home to the studio she has kept since 1994. “My mind clears of everything I’ve been thinking of at home,” she said during a recent conversation. “I go into the studio, have a tea, start to paint, and see what’s coming in. I wait for a tingling feeling like someone is watching me from behind. That’s where my ideas come from.”  

Like vivid flowers blooming out of damp soil and bright eyes emerging from dark wombs, German artist Rosa Loy has trekked deep through the trails of her own subconscious, lush with shaded verdure, and come to a restful pitstop within lichtung, a word she describes as “the place in the middle of a dark forest where the sun is shining.”

Many of the near-identical subjects of William Brickel’s Was It Ever Fair. at Michael Kohn Gallery are looking down or away, as though they’ve just heard something that made them blush; their robust cheekbones are sometimes touched by a little red.