"Natural Order" Solo Exhibition, Octavia Gallery
Press Release
Marina Savashynskaya Dunbar: Natural Order
August 2 - September 27, 2025
Opening Reception: Saturday, August 2nd, 6-8pm
Octavia Art Gallery is pleased to present Natural Order, a solo exhibition featuring new works by Marina Savashynskaya Dunbar.
Marina Savashyskaya Dunbar’s recent paintings are built from impressions of plants, landscapes, and horizons. In her creative process, Savashynskaya Dunbar prefers to create conditions for the painting to evolve organically rather than maintaining full control. She sets boundaries defined by practical forces such as gravity, humidity, and the fluidity of the paint. For instance, the artist decides how the canvas will be bent before the paint is poured—that decision is deliberate and controlled—but the flow of the paint is something she observes. Pigments, sand, and other media are layered across the surface, and each canvas becomes its own habitat where chance and structure coexist.
Recently, Savashynskaya Dunbar has extended this approach beyond the conventional rectangular picture plane. She designed rhombus-shaped panels that follow the Penrose pattern. Named for mathematician Sir Roger Penrose, this pattern joins diamond-shaped tiles in a precise arrangement that fills any plane without ever repeating. With its five-fold rotational symmetry—a pattern that can be rotated a fifth of a circle and still align—the design resists the usual grid while never losing coherence. The eye finds familiar five-pointed starbursts and kite-like blossoms, yet no section is identical to another, and the variation could continue to infinity, creating a quiet tension between order and endless variety. Similar atomic patterns have since been discovered in quasicrystals, linking this visual construction to the hidden geometries of matter itself. For Savashynskaya Dunbar, Penrose’s design offers a poetic reminder that the universe can be both disciplined and boundless at the same time.
Marina Savashynskaya Dunbar was born in Minsk, Belarus and moved to the United States at the age of nine. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Columbus State University. Most recent exhibitions were at Laura Rathe Fine Art, TX; Spalding Nix Fine Art, GA; Samuel Owen Gallery, FL; ABV Gallery, GA; and the Gibbes Museum of Art, SC. Her works are included in public collections at the Ritz-Carlton, FL; Chevron Headquarters, CA; Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NY; Mount Sinai, NY, among others. Savashynskaya Dunbar currently resides in Charleston, South Carolina.
Behind The Scenes
The rhombus panels in my installations Natural Order I and Natural Order II follow the Penrose pattern. There’s a rule for how each kind of tile can touch its neighbors, and those rules force the design to spread infinitely without repeating, maintaining order through five-fold symmetry—spinning it 72 degrees (one-fifth of a circle) reliably aligns the pattern.
My interest lies in emergent coherence—how simple local interactions produce collective behavior. The Penrose pattern embodies bottom-up logic, building complex, non-repeating arrangements from simple, local rules rather than following a predetermined overall blueprint. Its geometry is tied to the golden ratio (φ ≈ 1.618): the tiles meet at pentagonal angles (e.g., 36°, 72°, 108°), and key lengths follow 1:1.618 proportions—for example, the thick rhombus’s long diagonal is φ times its side, and the thin rhombus’s short diagonal is 1/φ times its side. Patterns with the same underlying structure have been found in certain rare crystalline formations, revealing a connection between this visual form and the concealed geometries of the natural world. To me, the Penrose pattern evokes the sense that reality can follow exact rules yet still unfold in limitless and unexpected ways.
Figure 1. (a) Penrose tiling is depicted. The translation symmetry is absent in the pattern; however, the pattern demonstrates the five-fold rotational symmetry. (b) Fragment of the Penrose tiling is shown.
The paintings are built with layers of acrylic washes and dense sand applications. In all my paintings, I try to preserve a certain looseness. I leave some drips on the surface because they remind me of the materiality of paint—its weight, movement, and motion. I am interested in work that captures a sensation or impression without literal illustration. Mystery gives the image room to breathe; it allows the picture to stay open, like a memory that doesn’t need to be exact to feel true.
