Union Gallery

Current Show: ARCADIA, Abigail Dudley and E.M Saniga Paintings

Opening: Wednesday, November 13, 2024 from 4 – 6 PM
November 13 – February 7, 2025

Union Gallery presents Arcadia at Wagner College, an exhibition of two painters – Abigail Dudley and E.M. Saniga. These two painters are friends of different ages and backgrounds. Saniga offers a landscape residency to students at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art to work outdoors on his 18th century farm in rural Pennsylvania. Dudley won the residency grant in 2021. Since then, they have become friends – even painting together in Italy. They share a sensibility arrived at via very different lives.

Their commonality has to do with the poetry of painting derived from looking. Both artists work from observation, yet seeing is a starting point in their work. Their paintings often develop independently from the motif.

Abigail Dudley, Queen Anne’s Lace, 2021, oil on linen, 48h x 62w in

Abigail Dudley (b. 1996) depicts aspects of everyday awash in atmospheric color and suffused light. Her compositions are mosaics of interlocking forms where objects and figures shift in and out of soft focus. She blurs images together, skews perspective and adds atmospheric painterly gestures allowing her figures to fade, and merge with backgrounds and interiors. She writes:

In my paintings, layered constructions of interior spaces and still lives act as portals to build a reality that is malleable. I’m interested in having highly rendered imagery and paper-thin memories exist within one image to bring a deeper level of looking.


E.M. Saniga, Peonies with Venus and the Moon (June 14), 2021, oil on plywood, 12 3/4h x 10 1/2w in

Based in Lancaster County PA, E.M Saniga is a mathematician – retired now, he was a distinguished professor of IT at the University of Delaware as well as a painter of stark engaging images of his environs in Lancaster County. Saniga paints from observation and memory, creating a model of reality at once naturalistic and mysterious, analytical and poetic. His motifs are traditional yet paradoxically unfamiliar. His paintings carry a sensitivity to the beauty of death and decay.

Roberta Smith has written in the NY Times, that Saniga continues “to erase the line between progressive and traditional.” His still life paintings possess a nocturnal luminosity. Paintings with figures are both surprising and compelling. Saniga’s light is often tamped down to assume an almost crepuscular glow. He works in a stone studio building with minimal illumination. A pair of mittens, a bird on a wire, a dancing pointer and a guitarist and a painting of peonies under the moon that exudes a perfume-like atmosphere.


John Yau writes in an essay for this exhibition about her paintings, “With each one, we stand at the threshold of a self contained world that cannot be named.We soon recognize that the ordinary things we see in this world are neither natural nor unnatural. I am rendered speechless. Long after seeing these paintings, I can remember so many details, from the deer looking at us as it crosses the highway to a full yellow moon floating low in band of green sky. It is as if I am recalling a dream.”

The exhibition was curated by Steven Harvey and is accompanied by a PDF album with an essay by John Yau.


Gallery Director: Jenny Toth
Email: jtoth@wagner.edu
Phone: (718)-420-4132 or (718)-390-3192

Union Gallery Address:
Union Hall (Main Floor), Wagner College
One Campus Road
Staten Island, NY 10301Gallery Hours:
Monday-Sunday 7am -10:30pm
Spotlight Gallery Address:
Horrmann Library, Wagner College
One Campus Road
Staten Island, NY 10301Gallery Hours:
Monday-Friday 9am -5pm