In Her Hauser & Wirth Debut, Firelei Báez Creates Portals for an Imaginative Future Beyond Collapse

A relentless worldbuilder and storyteller whose practice is informed as much by anthropological research as by spiritual sensitivity, Firelei Báez recently made her highly anticipated debut at Hauser & Wirth with “feet squelching on wet grass, nourished by uncertainty.”  The show takes over two floors of the gallery’s 22nd Street space in Chelsea, with a constellation of earthbound paintings and large-scale mythological sculptures on the ground floor and radiant new works on paper upstairs. Drawing on anthropology, geography, folklore, fantasy, science fiction and social history, she layers symbolic languages and appropriated iconographies into an ever-evolving personal mythology that investigates how bodies and nature shape our experience of being in the world, while inviting new imaginative possibilities for seeing this vital relation beyond the imposed—and clearly failing—anthropocentric and capitalist systems that have governed it.

As we walk through the show with Báez, she seems to float through the space with cadenced ease, describing the exhibition as a bridge between material and immaterial realms, with the works in the exhibition functioning as charged spaces of transition. In a historical moment she sees as intensely panoptic, where every gesture is quantified and made sellable, she is interested in finding freedom in slippage: the in-between spaces of rest, relief and transformation that allow one to see both the past and the present differently, reconnecting and reweaving those threads to envision an alternative future.

Blending parallel narratives and codes of representation, Báez has developed her own alternative system for mapping the history of civilization through the creative appropriation and reworking of colonial historical documents. Unsettling existing archival materials and challenging the conventional linear reading of history, she deconstructs those narratives to open possibilities for alternative viewpoints, connecting her search for fugitive possibility to the writer Octavia Butler, whose speculative fictional worlds emerged from a direct confrontation with the horrors of American history. In Butler’s speculative framework, she sees an imagining of life beyond binary systems, competition and verticality, where new forms of sensing and relation become possible: “In that escape into fiction she found a new life. It made me think what that life would be without the limits of our sense of war, competition, all types of hierarchies and binaries. She got rid of all that.”

Moving between temporalities and spaces, Báez’s densely hybrid visual universes allow different stories to coexist and collide in the service of writing a multilaterally multicultural version of history. Yet within the symbolic density of her entanglements of historical data, maps and natural and fantastical creatures, Báez intentionally preserves a degree of illegibility. Her layered compositions demand a more critical engagement, an active effort to decode the dense stratification that characterizes the human trajectory.

“I feel like there are so many facile filters today, that are labeling everything, consuming it and labeling it again… What is it, instead, to make something that is dense to navigate, so that you can have pockets of rest, pockets of escape, bubbles of being that allow you to become new?” she asks, noting how the human need to analyze and clarify through science and conventional systems of representation is part of an obsessive need for control and possession over our surroundings. For her, illegibility is not a refusal of meaning but a strategy against conscription, and an exercise in embracing the complexity of our position within a broader ecosystem and cosmic entanglement.

Many of Báez’s works begin from sourcing, appropriating and remediating documents of containment and control: diagrams, charts, maps and systems designed to compress entire worlds into two-dimensional fields. She is interested in the false authority of those systems, and in what they leave out. Her overlaying painterly gestures disrupt and unsettle the rational systematicity of these historical materials, becoming colorful symbolic figures that exist between human, animal and mythical beings, revealing signs of encounters among creatures, stories and spiritualities within the Atlantic Basin.

Báez points to one of the works, Not even unalterable limitations (or a transformational topology for re-membering Willard’s Chronographer of American History), inspired by a historical tree originally designed by American chronographer Emma Willard—a diagram meant to represent the foundational history of the U.S. in which no woman is named. “Not a single woman is mentioned in this foundational tree. So I wanted to re-corporealize it in her. Her face is in the middle, and the limbs are coming through.” Placing Willard’s face and a feminine force at the center, with a slippery, tentacular, jellyfish-like expansive form, Báez reclaims the body and power excluded from that historical corpus. “Even though the female body is not part of this corpus, it’s an integral part. I wanted to bring that power back in and have this one really slippery body, this removed presence, coming through again.”

When asked about her process, Báez answers that while each work begins with research, the painting itself is deeply intuitive and material. Each canvas starts horizontally on the floor, emerging from a Rorschach-like field as figures, eyes and forms appear through the physical behavior of pigment, water and surface.

Yet while Báez’s work is often recognized first through the marks of colonization, and therefore read within a lineage of postcolonial critique, she emphasizes that her focus is not only on the conscriptive forces that destroyed worlds. She wants to foreground broader systems of survival, thought, philosophy and spirituality that endured alongside and against those violences.

An extremely dense and intricate composition, Angelus Novus (the distance separating one from the other is not physical or geographical but ontological) is emblematic of this accumulation of layers of paint, history and symbols from which almost oracular, divinatory new meanings emerge. While the painting is nearly abstract, it was based on a 19th-century world population survey—a system that missed half the world in its attempt to quantify it. As figures and faces emerged from the vibrant matter of pigments agitated by painterly gestures, Báez allowed hidden presences to surface. “This one here is very hard to see. You have to dance around it to see it,” she explains, arguing that the difficulty of seeing becomes part of the work’s language and its capacity to be populated with new meanings. The title refers to Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, which she identifies as a prophetic attempt to view human history and fate differently, even amid the catastrophe of the Second World War.

As Michael Meade reminds us, “when culture seems about to unravel and even nature seems to rattle and reel, ideas and images of ‘the End’ can occur to anyone.” Periods of great uncertainty and radical change “stir our deepest forebodings and awaken the darkest corners of our souls, where fears of catastrophe and apocalyptic endings reside and have always resided.” Yet endings and beginnings are mythic moments par excellence—the extremities of existence and the bookends of cosmology, the extreme thresholds of human imagination where collapse and renewal, catastrophe and beginning, become inseparable.

Resonating deeply with this, Báez has been looking at different understandings of time, including systems such as Sankofa, oceanic thinking, Mesoamerican cycles and spiral forms, in which the past is not simply behind us and the future is not merely unknowable or a source of fear. In these models, the ability to imagine a deeper past expands the capacity to imagine a larger future. “When you view the future as an inevitable catastrophe, there are a lot of people you reduce, including people like us, who will never exist in that imaginary. “But we do exist, and I want to echo the other systems that imagined there was a possibility for us to be at all,” she says. “There are other systems that see that unknowable future and imagine possibilities for more capacity, for luscious expansion instead of catastrophic unknown. Even though these works anchor you in the physical realm, I wanted to remind us that there are systems that have survived deep horrors and generative advantages. In this mourning for a lost human future, we don’t think about the potentialities of integration with everything.”

Particularly significant is the monumental View of Nature (2026), an eight-panel painting stretching across the entire back wall of the gallery’s first floor. Drawing on John Emslie’s similarly titled 1852 engraving, the work traces gradations of climate and geography from the equator to the Arctic Circle, translating them into a visual taxonomic palimpsest that has both absorbed and revealed the deep entanglements and vital interdependence between the rhythms and cycles of nature and human creative intervention.

Standing before the painting and embarking on a journey through its expansive, rich surfaces, Báez speaks about moving beyond inherited hierarchies between the human and nonhuman. “We have inherited this idea of needing hierarchy, so you don’t consider how you are part of a cloud or a flower, or the innate things around you,” she reflects. “We are material, carbon-based beings: that is a limit for a purpose, but also a gift that still allows us to navigate in different ways. We are capable of something else. We have a hint of memory as a way of navigating time linearly, but our senses themselves are also ways of demarcating presence… We have this capacity for expanded being. It’s hinted at in so much work and practice, and in so many primordial religions and cultures before this construction of reality.”

The entire cycle is an exercise in envisioning the human future as entangled with clouds, flowers, water and other forms of being—a rejection of the inherited model of separation. The painting is also the result of a symbiotic collaboration with nature in its making, as proved by the organic traces accumulating across its surface. “This was made outdoors for months, and weather contributed very much,” Báez says. “I would paint, and then it would be rained on and disappear. I would paint again. All these marks show that settling in different kinds of vibration. I brought it back to the studio after it was stretched into eight panels, and then I would paint the memory of that experience.” The final work embodies time and the cycles of nature: it carries the vibrations of weather, water and time. Báez sees it as an image of world equilibrium, holding all fields and all seasons, particularly the threshold between summer and fall, when things are about to sleep, die and renew.

This fluidity between categories, genders and species is further celebrated through two large-scale totemic sculptures that inhabit the space as symbolic creatures emerging from Caribbean mythology. The ciguapas—hybrid female trickster figures from Dominican folklore that exist in an in-between state of human, plant and animal—appear as towering bronze sculptures, one adorned with plumes of real feathers and another with sculpted foliage, as if in continuous metamorphosis. Their bodies appear caught in vortical movement, bound by thick, rope-like braids that evoke hair, viscera and vegetal growth at once. The title Ayada connects this powerful symbolic presence to a major spirit or loa in Haitian Vodou and broader Afro-Caribbean religious traditions, associated with fertility, water, wind, rainbows, snakes, continuity, cosmic balance and the link between earth and sky.

Báez often thinks about how Cubism, Surrealism and early quantum theory, emerging at the same time, absorbed only fragments of older practices and ways of knowing. Yet both Western modernism and scientific discovery were already considering the energetic and multilayered nature of reality, beyond any linear or hierarchical representation. Now, with new technologies making quantum fields more materially legible, she sees the possibility of expanding beyond the weight of this hegemonic worldview and its history.

A particularly articulated work occupying an entire wall upstairs anchors the transition between the two parts of the show: between the earthly realm of human history and the pure cosmic transcendence of body and mind into light and energy on the floor above. Titled River Mirror (to reclaim our past, present and future selves, totally), it is a dense constellation of 111 deaccessioned book pages in which Báez has traced her own mythology, reactivating ancestral Caribbean knowledge, spirituality and mythologies, freely blended with references to colonial history and other cultures that have intersected across time. “Looking at these symbols, there’s everything from the Caribbean basin to the middle of England or the middle of the U.S. Spaces we’re not used to thinking of as indelibly enmeshed with the Caribbean are absolutely marked by it,” she reflects. Having studied anthropology, Báez has always been deeply interested in the continuous threads of human migration that result in cultural exchange, hybridization and dispersion. At the core are the symbols of two rivers and deities in the Yoruba pantheon. “Iskaya is the balance of creation, and Oshun in the Yoruba pantheon is healing, life and sweetness.” When you think of sweetness in different times, we usually understand it as lesser or weaker. In these traditions, what you’re taught is that it’s the only thing that will heal the irreparable.”

While the materials themselves are charged with colonial histories of exploitation, the pastel storytelling layered over them includes direct references to slavery, among them Brazilian balangandãs—silver charms worn by enslaved women that held symbolic, familial and economic value. These objects were part of systems of surveillance and containment, since their movement produced sound, yet they could also be used to purchase freedom, family freedom or land. “Each is symbolic and coded with family lineages. They would be payment to enslaved people, usually enslaved women, and they would hang from their waists. The name is like an onomatopoeia, supposed to sound like the jangling sound it would make when they moved. This thing that was your payment and your worldly possessions was also an act of surveillance.” For her, such objects reveal how, even within horrific systems, instruments of containment could become tools of freedom—a lineage, she suggests, that offers a model for contemporary life. “Even within that horrific space, that lineage gives us the freedom to be. In this place where we feel like every cell, breath and heartbeat is quantified and sold, we have needs within our arsenal for maroonage.”

If economic systems and modernity were modeled on enslavement in that space, the thought, religious practices and philosophy from that same space also offer escape routes for fugitivity within it, Báez argues. The complex history of the Caribbean, in her view, becomes both a model for what went wrong with modernity through enslavement, capitalism and extraction and a site that generated escape routes, religious practices and philosophies of fugitivity, offering possibilities for other ways of surviving them.

Water often emerges as a central element in Báez’s symbolic universe. The eight-panel work downstairs gradually dissolves into it, while liquid entities and water splashes make all her creatures fluid, as if in continuous metamorphosis and transformation. The fact that she was raised in the Dominican Republic, Báez admits, must have contributed to a deep awareness of islands, flooding and water cycles. To her, water represents the passage between the material and spirit worlds, a substance of sleep, subconsciousness, resilience and destruction. “Having water as this interlocutor and fundamental way of being, especially for us as humans, when so much of our being is water. These older epistemologies centered on water can offer that maroonage, that slippery way of escaping the panoptic vision of the world right now.”

Embracing this fluid nature of painting, the works upstairs become pure alchemies of light and energy, originating as liquid horizontal forms—visions that emerge alchemically from matter itself, shaped by pigment, powder, cooling, movement and the filter the mind brings to it. While for many viewers these works come as a surprise, Báez clarifies that abstraction and figuration have always been continuous tracks within her practice, despite her past tendency to leave the figure as a seductive anchor for the viewer to read the image.

Here, instead, is where life is, she acknowledges: these unbounded, expansive, abstract fields capture the energetic flows that entangle different beings and their fates within a broader cosmic web. “It becomes a suggestive message within every material that every cell is a cosmos. That’s something they’ve hinted at forever,” she emphasizes. Pigments radiate, crystallize and explode again across these luminous surfaces, appearing as cosmically vast as formations of interstellar space or as psychedelically intense as a sudden vision within the expansive reaches of the mind. Fluctuating in space, these works become hypnotic portals into another dimension, one that is within us and everything: the energetic nucleus and the expansive power of imagination that allow us to approach something beyond our sensory capacities, our flesh-bound earthly condition and any intelligible or linguistic containment.

Báez says she hopes viewers will take this journey, navigating freely and fully embodied through the works, allowing themselves to populate entire worlds within them. Toward the end of our conversation, when asked whether her work reactivates, revitalizes or produces a counter-myth, she preferred the terms counter-imagination and re-imagination: “I think of it as an act of symbolic reactivation, opening a filter, an act of recalibration. This is just about unhearing what’s there.” The myth, she says, is already there; what she hopes to spark is imagination, allowing art to work poetically against labels, limits and bounding vessels. “We are social, creative beings. What I’m giving to the viewer, are tools of re-engagement and opening up our capacity for the symbolic.”

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