Laurena Finéus '24 Tells 'Cautionary Tales' at Fridman Gallery

"If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you."

–Audre Lorde, "The Uses of Anger"

Cautionary Tales: A Symphony of Anger/Kòlè, the debut New York solo exhibition by Laurena Finéus '24, which opened last month at Fridman Gallery, considers anger as a form of knowing. 

In Finéus's most ambitious body of work to date, she enters a dialogue with the Haitian author Marie Vieux-Chauvet across her trilogy, Love, Anger, Madness—and the recurring figure of "La Femme Désordre," or "The Disorderly Woman."

Working with oil, ink, pigment, and acrylic between abstraction and realism, Finéus refuses fixity in favor of poetics. Rooted in Black Caribbean ecologies, her botanical and fleshy figures emerge in fragments: the edge of a lip dances with mangroves, "zombie palms," and red peacock flowers—historically used as an abortifacient. Plants are not "background" or "landscape," but significant actors, too.

Finéus's nonfigurative anti-herione exists in various stages of revolt and becoming. The ropey coils and knots of She was a Legba, A Path Opener (oil, ink, pigment, and acrylic on canvas, 68" x 60", 2026) explore birth not as an arrival, but as a site of exchange. Referencing her mother's and aunt's near-death birth experiences, violence and loss are transmitted in this exchange alongside vital life forces: air, water, and earth. 

In the diptych, In Low Hanging Fruit, bruised in the shade (oil, ink, mica, pigment, and acrylic on canvas, 30" x 40", 2026) and Fruits bas, meurtris dans l’ombre (oil, ink, mica, pigment, and acrylic on canvas 48" x 36", 2026) camouflage both subjugates and shields the figures—a commentary on how colorism, sexism, and ageism interact in Vieux-Chauvet's books. In the center of the diptych, a custard apple rests in an open cage—a heart drying quietly, open despite confinement.

"Working toward my first New York solo exhibition has been an intense and intimate process, one that has felt at once like a painful reckoning and a necessary expansion," Finéus wrote in the illustrated catalogue published by Fridman for the exhibition. "While it extends long-standing concerns within my practice, it also marks a shift in how openly I allow disorder, anger, and contradiction to take form publicly and with much vulnerability."

Laurena Finéus is a Haitian-Canadian artist born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario and based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work is held in the public collections of Google, Canada Council Art Bank, and the City of Ottawa. She was the recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Fund award (2023), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant (2022-23), the Ottawa Arts Council IBPOC Emerging Artist Award (2022), the Edmund and Isobel Ryan Visual art scholarship (2020), and the Ineke Harmina Standish Memorial award (2019). In 2025, Fineus's work was featured in The Shed’s Open Call: Portals.

Cautionary Tales is on view at Fridman Gallery at 169 Bowery through June 19, 2026.