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Mary Grace Wolnski is a painter born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Working in oil, she makes gestural, visceral paintings exploring the entanglement of the body, religion, and the natural world.

Trained in classical and contemporary dance, she brought her study of movement to painting in 2012. She trained at ateliers in Florence, Italy and Baltimore, Maryland, and studied at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where courses in earth science, land inquiry, and abstract painting shaped her engagement with the land through her work. A residency in Oaxaca, Mexico, deepened her interest in the sacred and the bodily, and a year-long mentored painting program in New York further shaped her practice.

Her work is held in private and corporate collections across 30 states and has been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the Southeast and in Chelsea, New York.

I'm interested in the intimate relationship between the body, religion, and the natural world. Through my paintings, I explore the raw and loving wrestling of intestines, the Divine, and the breathing earth. I think about blood, the gut, particles of matter, and the electromagnetic forces coursing through both the body and the earth.

I'm interested in the belly of things — our deep, dark, communicating insides, and in viscera: the hidden, tender interiors of the body. I like to think about blood and intestines personified: the gut as your closest friend, rolling in the mud with you, holding your face in its hands, whispering, guiding, listening, intimate.

I'm interested in murky, dank, fertile earth — the teeming life beneath the surface and the mystical nature of dense vegetation. I'm drawn to embodied traditions and the physicality of ritual — to darkness as a mystical, generative depth, and to saints and mystics who turned to their gut as divine guidance.

My paintings are built from visceral reds, vibrant greens, fluid line work, loose washes, and a brute, gestural application of paint. In them, the innards of the body, spirit, and land collapse into one another.

I aim to create palpable paintings that feel both raw and tender that explore the sacredness of the body and its inextricable bond to God and the lush and electric natural world.