IZZY LEE
Beverly Acha
Circular Ruins

ON VIEW
APRIL 17, 2026 — MAY 30, 2026

 IZZY LEE is pleased to present Circular Ruins, the LA debut of painter Beverly Acha. Based between Brooklyn, NY and Bennington, VT, Acha has created a new body of work that takes up the rich symbolism of time — spirals, infinity symbols — and the systems we use to order it, playfully opening and subverting both to imagine other possibilities.

In the show's titular painting, circular ruins (infinity loop, time machine), deep blue spirals stretch across two canvases, shifting in tone and converging into a lighter blue form that conjures an infinity symbol. This typically symmetrical symbol is made asymmetrical in Acha's hands: its center is pulled to one side and its continuous line is split again by the tightly concentric forms on the right canvas. The familiar is made unstable—not broken but opened, full of movement and potential. The large organic circular shape behind the disrupted symbol evokes the nautilus shell—one of the oldest living creatures on earth, whose spiral pattern recurs throughout the natural world.

The main form of the left canvas suggests a mechanical clock face, though here, the standardized twelve hands move in dizzying, uneven intervals beneath an ochre-green spiral that winds across it—layering one system of time over another. The clock as we know it is a relatively modern invention, rooted in industrial capitalism: the factory shift, the train schedule, the punch clock. Along the right edge of the right canvas, circular forms diminish in size alongside yellow crescents, evoking the waxing and waning of the moon—another cycle of time, older than the clock, and ungoverned by it. Cyclicality here is not reassuring so much as persistent—these forms keep moving, keep transforming, refusing to be governed by a single center.

The work draws on magical realism—the Latin American literary movement of the mid-20th century—and the exhibition takes its title from Jorge Luis Borges's short story from 1940. In this tradition, the fantastic describes and critiques lived social and political worlds: colonialism, displacement, and the cyclical nature of history and power. Time is not linear but layered—the past is never finished, and the surreal is often simply the real, named honestly. Magical realism, as a specifically Latin American form, carries deep personal significance for Acha whose parents immigrated to the US from Argentina and Honduras, continuing an ancestral history of displacement. Her paintings insist that other spaces—other temporalities—exist within and alongside the world as it is. These are not invented utopias but present possibilities, held in the bright disorder of the work itself.

Acha builds a visual language held in the spiral that doesn't resolve, the clock that doesn't quite comply, the moon that keeps its own time. Circular Ruins is a small act of resistance: a space in which the worlds that persist alongside our own open to the viewer.


Beverly Acha, circular ruins (infinity loop, time machine), 2026, oil on canvas, 51 x 120 in. Photo courtesy Josh Schaedel.


Portrait of Beverly Acha in the artist's studio. Photo credit Ally Caple.