Lilienthal Gallery’s ‘Pattern: The Art of Repetition’ Explores the Meaning Beneath the Motif

Walk into Lilienthal Gallery’s new Pattern: The Art of Repetition, and your brain gets to work doing what it does best: making sense of what’s in front of it.

Patterns help us organize and process information. Where does this thing fit into my understanding of the world? I know that today is Friday because it is after Thursday and before Saturday. I can write this sentence, and you can understand it, because we’ve both been taught that letters strung together in certain patterns produce certain meanings. 

Think of music, history, nature, time. Zoomed all the way in, we are made of patterns ourselves, spiraling strands of DNA that loop variations on the same ancient theme until something emerges that looks like us. 

The patterns in Lilienthal’s show repeat, echo, fragment and build. From intricate webs of lace-like structures to bright, chunky, elemental shapes on parade, they challenge us to consider the nature of repetition through its visual representation. How is it created? How can it be dismantled? What, if anything, does it mean?

“People hear ‘pattern’ and think stripes, polka dots, fabric,” gallery director Kelly Ferguson tells me during a walkthrough ahead of tonight’s opening. “And that’s part of it, but that’s not really what most of the work is doing.”

This show, on view through June, takes a looser, more expansive approach. Pattern shows up here as grids, symbols, pixels, botanicals and mythologies. 

“Pattern can just be decorative, but there’s also a lot of meaning and detail behind it,” Kelly says. From Appalachian quilts to Andean textiles to braided hair traditions, she explains, patterns have long functioned as a kind of visual shorthand for identity, history and belief. 

“When I was researching, I was looking at all these different patterns and what they signify. Some are more literal, but most of the work here takes the idea of repetition and translates it into something more abstract.”

Sometimes the pattern is obvious; sometimes it’s hiding in plain sight; sometimes one pattern obscures another (which, if you’ll join me here in the weeds, creates a new pattern). I stare at one of Patricio Rodriguez’ layered, cut-paper works, my nose about six inches away from the glass, so mesmerized by its mandala-esque overlay that I am startled to realize someone is staring back at me from beneath. 

But you don’t have to decode every layer to fully experience what’s in front of you.

“So much of it is like a hidden language,” Kelly said. “You can dip into it and there’s a lot of meaning, or you can just enjoy it.”

Italian artist Tellas layers botanical forms from his native Sardinia into gridded compositions that feel structured but still organic, somewhere between landscape and architecture.

Argentinian artist Bayona builds dense compositions from symbols drawn from archaeological research in the Andes—bats, mushrooms, deities, geometric forms—each element carrying its own cosmology.

Basmat Levin paints patterns gathered through travel and cultural observation, creating joyful, saturated works that feel like textiles blown up to architectural scale.

Patricio Rodriguez constructs intricate, layered pieces that mirror biological systems—roots, veins, neural networks—mapping connections between the physical body and something more spiritual.

Juan Manuel Rozas pulls from myth and folklore, including the legend of the Uturunku tiger-man, using pattern and texture to explore the porous boundary between human and animal, earth and spirit.

Knoxville artist Jered Sprecher approaches pattern through fragmentation: light filtered through leaves, broken into pixel-like forms that sit somewhere between the natural world and the digital one.

Also on exhibition, downstairs: the work of Walker Antonio, a Virginia-based Filipino-American painter whose work blurs the boundaries between the real and surreal.  

Pattern: The Art of Repetition is on view at Lilienthal Gallery (23 Emory Pl.) through June. An opening reception will be held Friday, April 3 from 5–8 p.m., with a gallery talk by Jered Sprecher at 6:30 p.m. Attire: patterns, if you’re feeling on theme.

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Update – photos from the opening!