Reviewed by Mark Jenkins 

March 29, 2024

Best known as an outdoor muralist, Lisa Marie Thalhammer was instrumental in creating the gallery of wall and door paintings in Washington’s Blagden Alley — recently seen in Tsai Ming Liang’s “Abiding Nowhere,” a meditative film commissioned by the National Museum of Asian Art. Thalhammer, who now divides her time between D.C. and her native St. Louis, is an LGBTQ+ activist whose rainbow-colored “Love” mural in Blagden Alley echoes the hues of the Pride flag. The artist has taught yoga, and she references the color system of chakras (supposed focal points within the body used for meditation). These inspirations wheel through “Chromatic Dialogue,” Thalhammer’s show at the University of Maryland Art Gallery. 

The selection includes photographs of several Thalhammer outdoor projects, including her “Equilateral Network” of interlocking multicolor triangles painted on the National Building Museum lawn in 2021. There’s also a version of the “Love” design rendered in glittery pigment. Ever the muralist, Thalhammer painted a rainbow of large vertical stripes directly on two perpendicular walls, with green at the corner where the planes meet. 

Less expected and more kinetic are pictures in which Thalhammer lets colors flow by chance. Two paintings were made with strings dipped in pigment and swirled across the surface. The show’s centerpiece is a triptych that shifts as usual from red to yellow to blue, but the colors are cascades of drips deepened by blacks and brightened by flashes of white. While the procession of colors is foregone, each of the gestures is alive with spontaneity.