I think my task is to tell the truth and still bring beauty into the world.

(Mayme Kratz)

In January 2025, Lisa Sette Gallery will celebrate its 40th season with an exhibition of work by venerated Phoenix artist Mayme Kratz, whose luminous pieces have come to epitomize the transformational nature of Lisa Sette Gallery's commitment to its artist and to the work of revealing new truths about human creativity.

Kratz encases found organic objects in cast resin forms, arranging each precious and often tiny component into breathtaking formations that may resemble expanding galaxies, spreading forests, billowing grasses, or microscopic organisms. A collector of gifts from the ground and an explorer of forgotten places, Kratz does not contrive to replicate a given environment or expound a specific narrative about the places that she finds her archive of fascinating objects.

Instead her works present a personal catalog of the vast systems of the natural world: the bleached bones of animals who died in the brush, the roots and seeds and splinters that result when organic systems live and die, multiply and ascend. Infused with poetry and longing, Kratz's arrangements of biological matter in resin are majestic, glowing tributes to the foundational matter of the earth's biological systems.