Painted both inside the studio and in the surrounding woodland in rural Connecticut, these works on paper are intimate in size, close-up, tightly framed compositions of nature and the male form. Altfest’s practice is grounded in intense observation from life; exquisitely rendered, the works offer a deeply engaged and revelatory realism at a meticulous, one-to-one scale.

In several works, Altfest combines a tiny section of skin – hairy, unmistakably male and, in this series, that of her husband – with various natural objects, such as a peanut, leaf or acorn.

Although the male body has always been part of Altfest’s artistic vocabulary, present in some form or other in most of her images, it is here pushed to the background so that object becomes figure and skin becomes ground. This procedure continues in the work Acorn (2021), which shows a tiny acorn on skin, a shape we think we know but possibly rarely pause to study, here taking on a breast-like appearance.