Dana Powell’s “Natural” at Galería Elvira González, Madrid: Small Paintings of an Uneasy Paradise

Headlights on a dirt road. A frog. A crow on a power line. A moth that has landed, of all places, on the net of a tennis court. None of these things is spectacular, and none of the 31 paintings in Dana Powell’s “Natural” at Galería Elvira González, Madrid contains a single human figure. Yet people are everywhere in them — in the roads they built, the fires they set, the lights they left on. Opened on 5 November 2026, the exhibition is the American painter’s first solo show in Europe, and it introduces a quiet, unsettling voice to Spanish audiences.

Who is Dana Powell?

Powell was born in Milwaukee in 1989 and lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. She studied fine art at The Cooper Union, graduating in 2015, and took part in the Still House Group residency the following year. Her career has been closely tied to Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, which has given her solo shows in New York — “Burner” (2019), “Night Tripper” (2023) and “The Moon Is Still Free” (2025) — and in Los Angeles, “Drinking Dust” (2021). She has also appeared in “The Lure of the Dark”, a group exhibition curated by Susan Cross at MASS MoCA. The titles alone tell you something: night, fire, dust, the moon.

A naturalist who keeps finding us

Powell builds each exhibition around an invented character, a device that gives a set of small paintings the coherence of a story. For Madrid, according to the gallery’s announcement, that character is an amateur naturalist who goes out to look for birds and butterflies and keeps stumbling on signs of human intervention instead. It is a gentle joke with a serious edge. Ecological thinking has spent decades questioning the line between nature and culture; Powell paints what it looks like when that line blurs in an ordinary backyard.

The setting is suburban America, where, as the press material describes it, unease comes from the everyday rather than the supernatural. The show reworks the great American road trip on a domestic scale: instead of epic highways, dirt tracks; instead of canyons, misty woods glimpsed from a car at night.

What hangs on the walls

The 31 paintings, made between 2024 and 2026, are all small in format — Field fire 2 (2026), one of the works reproduced in the press, measures just 35.6 by 40.6 centimetres. Subjects include roads lit by headlights, fog-covered landscapes, still lifes of fruit and closed lift doors. Luna Moth shows the insect resting on a tennis net, a perfect image of wildness parked in a leisure landscape.

The Spanish novelist Jacobo Bergareche, who wrote the catalogue text, has described more of the scenes in a post published on the eve of the opening: thin clouds and light flickering at the bottom of a blue pool; the blurred shadow of a blind on a bedroom wall in morning light; a halo around the moon; what look like controlled burns in stubble fields; cars on dirt roads at night, seen from inside and outside; and a round peephole in a door, which he reads as the key to the exhibition’s game of looking. He compares Powell’s framing to Vermeer’s View of Delft and her restraint to the prose of Raymond Carver and J. D. Salinger, and the catalogue praises her “unhurried, silent and distant contemplation”. The book itself pairs his text with 31 photographs of the works.

Elvira González and the Madrid context

Galería Elvira González opened in February 1994, founded by Elvira González, who had previously run Galería Theo from 1966 to 1991; it is now directed by Elvira and Isabel Mignoni. Based on Calle de los Hermanos Álvarez Quintero near Alonso Martínez, it is one of the city’s most established addresses for international art. Giving a young American painter her European debut is a meaningful vote of confidence, and the intimate scale of Powell’s works suits the gallery’s rooms.

Why it matters for collectors and painters

For collectors, this is an early chance to see in Europe an artist already established with a major New York gallery. Thirty-one small works also make for an unusually rich survey of a single current body of work.

For painters, Powell is a lesson in how much a small canvas can hold. Atmosphere — fog, glare, the cone of a headlight — is notoriously hard to paint; she makes it the protagonist. And her habit of inventing a character to organise a show is a smart curatorial tool for any artist building a body of work.

Visiting information

Galería Elvira González, Calle de los Hermanos Álvarez Quintero 1, 28004 Madrid. From 5 November 2026; the Arte Madrid gallery association lists the closing date as 16 January 2027 (another listing gives 9 January, so confirm before visiting). Open Monday to Friday 10:30–19:30, Saturday 11:00–14:00. Tel. +34 91 319 59 00, [email protected]. See the gallery’s Dana Powell page, our Dana Powell Madrid listing, and more shows on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.