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.

In Leaf (2021), for example, a dried leaf appears to blend into the skin on which it sits, the intricate patterning of veins on the leaf’s surface and the dark hairs on the skin forming an seamless pictorial continuum; the whole painted in progressive shades of black, brown and beige.