The work of Gina Werfel (b.1951) brings together multiple visual languages, balancing precise, graphic lines and stenciled forms with fluid, organic gestures. Her layered compositions create an interplay between control and spontaneity, evoking memory and movement within ambiguous, shifting spaces. In her recent process-driven monoprints, Werfel explores the contrast between digital aesthetics and the artist’s hand, further emphasizing the push and pull between mechanical and organic mark-making.

Travel has had a lasting influence on Werfel’s practice. During a residency in Singapore, she began incorporating spray-painted stencils over gestural brushwork, using everyday textured materials and Chinese New Year’s decorations as sources. A 2016 residency at the American Academy in Rome re-ignited her fascination with Baroque ceiling paintings, inspiring her to introduce spatial complexity and open compositions in her work.

As Karen Wilkin has written, "She celebrates the painter’s role in transferring pigment to surface, deploying a wide vocabulary of gestures to weave loose, all-over, pulsating fabrics across the canvas, conjuring up intense sensations of light and air. While Werfel’s paintings can seem to allude to nature and to perceptions of our surroundings, in general, they are also emphatically about the act of painting...Not surprisingly, given the disparate origins of the works on view in Werfel’s California and Long Island City studios, some offered suggestions of the outdoors, vegetation, even blossoms, while others seemed more associated with the man-made environment, but all clearly reflected the same sensitivity to the nuances of actuality and delight in inventing painterly equivalents for lived experience." (The Hudson Review, Autumn 2024)

Werfel’s work has been widely exhibited in the US and internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Coombs Gallery at the American University of Paris; Korn Gallery at Drew University; Prince Street Gallery in New York; and the Mondavi Winery in Napa. She has participated in residencies at the American Academy in Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the International School of Painting in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy. In 2017, she completed "Clearing" a multi-panel public art commission for Burnett Miller Park in Sacramento.

Werfel holds an MFA from Columbia University, a Certificate from the New York Studio School, and a BA from Hamilton College.