Shapeshifter

Opening reception: Wednesday, September 9, 6–8pmExhibition walkthrough with the artist: Wednesday, September 30, 11am

CHART is pleased to present Shapeshifter, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Brooklyn-based artist Anna Ortiz, on view from September 9 through October 31, 2026.

Ortiz develops a body of paintings that take the form of landscapes while constructing a fictitious world shaped by ancient mythology and personal history. Drawing from her Mexican-American heritage, Mesoamerican cosmologies, and narratives surrounding migration and origin, the works take place within a mutable borderland: a space of passage, reflection, and wonder.

This new body of work extends the concerns of her recent exhibition Nocturnos en Sayula, further developing her exploration of cyclical time and symbolic imagery. Recurring elements—volcanic landscapes, reflective bodies of water, indigenous plant life, ancient relics, and mythological figures—function as active agents within a world the artist builds through paint. Working within a restricted palette, Ortiz heightens the perceptual intensity of each scene through subtle shifts in value and temperature.

Central to the exhibition is the figure of the jaguar, understood within Mesoamerican spiritual traditions as a nahual, or shapeshifting guide. Ortiz adopts the jaguar’s perspective as an elastic point of view: at once author, subject, and viewer. Through this framework, the paintings place the viewer within the space itself, where the landscape becomes something to migrate through rather than observe.

Ortiz builds a world where time collapses and wonder overtakes fixed ideas of border and place. Guided by nahuales, the paintings open onto an impossible terrain where history, mythology, and the present converge. ◆

Anna Ortiz is a Mexican-American painter based in Brooklyn, New York. Raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, she spent much of her childhood visiting family in Guadalajara, Mexico, where she studied art with her grandfather, a professional portrait painter, and her aunt, a sculptor. These formative experiences continue to inform her work.