A catalogue for Nicky Broekhuysen’s exhibition The Channeling at Davidson Gallery in New York. Broekhuysen’s large-scale paintings are inspired by the real-life story of Marge Hugo, who for a decade channeled the spirits of Claude Monet and other notable Impressionist painters through her writing.

The Channeling

A catalogue for Nicky Broekhuysen’s exhibition The Channeling at Davidson Gallery in New York. Broekhuysen’s large-scale paintings are inspired by the real-life story of Marge Hugo, who for a decade channeled the spirits of Claude Monet and other notable Impressionist painters through her writing.

The book is structured in two complementary parts. The first presents a selection of Hugo’s channelled letters alongside her own artwork, tracing the ten-year arc of her metaphysical relationship with Monet. The second is dedicated to Broekhuysen’s monumental recreations of Monet’s paintings, executed entirely through the stamping of binary digits, 0 and 1, across the canvas. Views of the full paintings are alternated with real-life scale details, creating an interplay of scale that runs through the whole book, from Hugo's intimate letters to Broekhuysen's monumental canvases.

The design tries to capture and hold these two worlds—the intimate and spiritual, the monumental and digital—in tension without forcing them together.