“Where do images come from,” asks Hanna Hur—less a question than a kind of summons. “Repetitive gesture becomes a petitioning of the gods for the image to come near.” Her absorbing compositions hinge on the constancy of the grid, transformed through prolonged encounter from static matrix to embodied event. In an essay that accompanies Hur’s first solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, Daniel Marcus details her approach to painting “as ‘an act of submission’ . . . testing her capacity (and ours as well) to bear the burden of its mystery.”

Each new work in Annunciation contains a base layer of thinned black paint, applied in brushstrokes that seem to ebb like water or scattered clouds against a darkened sky. That rhythmic ground is then plotted with a rectilinear grid, coupling the biomorphic and geometric modes that abstraction tends to cleave apart. What looks immaculate from a distance begins to waver on close inspection—the drag of pencil against the tooth of raw canvas divulging the…