Sean Micka
Three Women
March 5 - April 18, 2026
Rescued Manuscript, 2025
Oil on canvas
48 x 30 inches
121.92 x 76.20 cm
P.O.R
Marianne, 2025
Oil on panel
20 x 16 inches
50.8 x 40.64 cm
P.O.R
Freddie, 2025
Oil on canvas
20 x 16 inches
50.8 x 40.64 cm
P.O.R
There is an ethical model implicit in reparation: not to “fix” the past by smoothing it, but to witness, to document, and to demand accountability. Sean Micka’s paintings - material, slow, layered with gestures of erasure and repair - do exactly this. They are antidotes to the instant, forgetful pulse of the newsfeed. They create friction: a viewer must stop, reconcile, and carry something forward. They run counter to the destruction of history.
Micka’s three works, Rescued Manuscript, Marianne and Freddie, circle around a central concern in his practice: portraits of women engaged in acts of resistance alongside the recovery of evidence and/or artifacts threatened by historical erasure.
Rescued Manuscript, from Micka’s Kodachrome series, depicts a woman covered in mud carrying an ancient manuscript salvaged from the aftermath of a colossal flood. Drawn from photographs published in National Geographic and produced through Kodachrome film, the image binds human endurance to the fragile survival of cultural memory. With its heightened chromatic intensity and near-advertorial sheen, the Kodachrome series meditates on color as mnemonic charge, linking the material history of print culture to the vulnerability (and persistence) of images and texts in the face of catastrophe and technological obsolescence.
Marianne and Freddie, from Micka’s ongoing series Ancillary Figures, portrays Marianne Baum (1912–1942) and Freddie Nanda Dekker-Oversteegen (1925–2018). Baum, a German communist executed for her role in the arson attack on the Nazi propaganda exhibition The Soviet Paradise. The painting returns to her image as both remembrance and rupture, positioning painting itself as archive and counter-monument.
Nanda Dekker-Oversteegen (1925–2018), joined the Dutch resistance at age fourteen, distributing pamphlets, sabotaging infrastructure, and rescuing Jewish children from deportation alongside her sister Truus and Hannie Schaft. In painting her portrait, Micka sought to honor this tension: the fragile courage of a girl whose ordinary face concealed extraordinary resolve. Like others in Ancillary Figures, Freddie transforms historical image into an act of witnessing, restoring presence to figures that defied disappearance.
Sean Micka lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received his BFA from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Bienvenu Steinberg, New York; Maki Fine Art, Tokyo; Krakow Witkin, Boston, Massachusetts and MassMoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts (upcoming). His exhibitions has been reviewed in Artforum, Flash Art and The Boston Globe. His work is included in the following public collections: The Getty, Los Angeles, California; The Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts; M+, Hong Kong and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.