56 HENRY is pleased to present Speed Stick, an exhibition of new work by Jo Messer, on view from March 19th through May 17th at 56 and 105 Henry Street.

Speed Stick submerges 56 Henry in the slippery worlds of Jo Messer. In this suite of paintings, bodies, fish and gestures populate the panels, operating in the hazy space between figuration and abstraction. Speed Stick evokes motion, adhesion, and the deeply human aspects of being. In this presentation, Messer lays those uncomfortabilities bare. Messer’s representational forms seem to unabashedly slide, repeat, and slip off of her surfaces. Speed Stick embraces the unease: Do it fast. Do it messy. Do it a little bit wet?

Messer employs motifs which have long influenced her compositions: mouths, limbs, and feet. In her newest body of work, fish are introduced as a central form through which new avenues into sensuality and physicality unfold. Fish emerge as a recurring pictorial form, evocative of traditional western still life painting.

The image of the fish itself, always with a gaping mouth, transcends its substance. A fish is a prize, an open wound, a means of sustenance. Its body is curved and slick. In these works fish fall in and out of focus, moving fluidly between object, body, and gesture. Here, where lovers surface and disappear, fragments of limbs get drawn to the foreground as Messer investigates the nexus of intuition and representation. The fish become an extension of this play, both fish and figure emerging carefully throughout her panels. Messer draws out compositional elegance amidst the awkward, the slimy, and the grotesque.

Throughout the exhibition, Messer employs a strategy of compositional doubling, repeating forms across and within panels. Her imagery fractalizes lithely, migrating and echoing in equal measure. Repetitions themselves destabilise the clarity of her narratives and create both rhythm and echo in her language. The rhythm of the paintings lends to their intensity, and their tactile nature connotes something slick, slimy, and ultimately unstable. This physicality asserts itself in the playful rush of shape and form that saturate and transcend the boundaries of Messer’s panels.

For the first time, Messer crops significant portions of figures out of her frames as she investigates permanence and hierarchy of image in aesthetic expression. In her work, lovers without faces and feet without bodies emphasize form over narrative. Suddenly, the curve of a calf or the bones of a knee become gestural fragments, as Messer pushes even further into the abstract.

Speed Stick invites both the delicate and the unblushing to the forefront. Among the familiar and the alien, Messer constructs entirely new associations. In her constellations of form and figure, Messer mines a vein situated gracefully between still life, figure painting and sumptuous abstraction.

- Tucker Drew, 2026