On view September 20 - November 14, 2025

Sat 9/20, 4-6 pm: Opening reception
Sat 10/11, 4-6 pm: Sepulchritude - a conversation with the artists of Resting Place, with an accompanying performance by composer and cellist Eden Rayz
Thu 10/30, 6-8 pm: Halloween Party - costumes encouraged, best dressed wins a prize!

13FOREST Gallery is pleased to present Resting Place, an exhibition of new paintings by Nicole Duennebier and Mike Ryczek. In Resting Place Duennebier and Ryczek ponder a recurring theme in both of their work, that of an absent yet strongly felt presence. Summoning an atmosphere of mystery and curiosity tinged with menace, both artists meditate on tombs, makeshift altars and accumulations of objects, sites laden with meaning not immediately accessible to the viewer. Through hallucinatory compositions, conveyed and obscured by arcane iconography, Ryczek and Duennebier create an environment for their morbid fascinations. 

On her frequent walks through the woods and cemetery, Duennebier is drawn to unusual features of the landscape that feel both composed and derelict. Duennebier paints naturally occurring voids, such as holes in a tree stump or the recess under a log, in which collections of natural and manmade objects have aggregated. Each painting is an aperture that focuses the viewer’s attention on hints of miniscule yet dense tales within the composition. For this new series, Duennebier has returned to oil paint for the first time since art school, painting on canvas and copper in addition to her typical panel. The copper surface enabled Duennebier to experiment with new ways of rendering light, while an unusual fluorescent paint evokes the delinquent yet provocative quality of graffiti. In each painting, Duennebier offers the experience of stumbling upon a perplexing scene and wondering about the person or entity that left it behind. 

Contrasting Duennebier’s organic arrangements, which appear to arise naturally from the landscape, Ryczek assembles meticulously composed structures invoking altars and mausoleums. Inspired by a visit to St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans and later research into Santa Cruz Cemetery in the Asian country of Timor-Leste, Ryczek constructed miniature tomb models, using the physicality of this process to invigorate his approach to painting. Ryczek has populated these tombs with decontextualized symbols that serve as a memorial for someone who has fallen from memory, or perhaps never existed. The cryptic structures, rendered in a dreamy palate of purples, grays and blues, manifest Ryczek’s preoccupation with nostalgia for his childhood in the eighties and our modern predilection for distraction. Presenting a contemporary take on the vanitas still life, Ryczek visualizes a psychological landscape of modern anxieties, blending a fixation on idealized pleasures of the past with a fear of entertaining oneself to death.

Preview Resting Place

About the Artists

Nicole Duennebier was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1983. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting from the Maine College of Art, where her thesis work was strongly influenced by research into Maine’s coastal ecosystems. In 2006 she was awarded the Monhegan Island Artists Residency, where she continued her exploration of sea life and discovered a natural connection between the darkness and intricacy of undersea regions and the aesthetic of 16th-century Dutch still-life painting.

In 2008 Duennebier moved to the Boston area, and now lives and works in Malden. She is a 2016 and 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Painting Fellow and her work can be found in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the New Britain Museum of American Art. Writing about Bright Beast, her 2013 solo show at the Lilypad in Cambridge, Cate McQuaid of the Boston Globe said Duennebier’s “technical mastery gives the artist what she needs to seduce the viewer; the content lowers the boom.”  Duennebier has also been featured in Art New England, Hi-Fructose Magazine and Portland Press Herald, among other publications.

Duennebier's work has been featured at the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, the Shelburne Museum in Vermont and the Cahoon Museum of Modern Art on Cape Cod. Her first solo show at 13FOREST, The Great Season, ran from January through March 2014. Subsequent solo shows at the gallery were View into the Fertile Country (2018), Floral Hex (2021) and Tender Burden (2023).

Mike Ryczek was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1984 and graduated from Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 2006 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration. He lives and works as a full-time painter and designer in Dedham, Massachusetts. Ryczek’s work was selected for a juried exhibition at the Danforth Art Museum in 2015, and has been featured in Art Maze Mag and by the Jealous Curator. BOOOOOOOM has twice given Ryczek its Editor’s Pick award and he was a recipient of the 2022 Painting Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

Ryczek was featured in a solo exhibition, Fascination Street, at 13FOREST in 2020. He was interviewed by My Modern Met about his work for Fascination Street; read the full interview here.