In Jennifer Coates’ paintings, figures, animals, and insects appear like ghosts within abstracted landscapes that are a hybrid of direct observation at specific locations, art historical research, and painterly improvisation. She has also added a new motif to her compositions: simple structures containing dark portals based on images of abandoned World War II bunkers in the forests of Europe. Coates’ artworks are inspired by 17th-century Dutch Symbolist painting (a baroque genre of forest floor still lifes) as well as ancient Roman garden frescoes. Containing a variety of marks she slowly accumulates in layers, Coates' oeuvre forms a flickering but cohesive whole. In these hallucinatory worlds, light effects get amplified, and colors are intensified via synthetic and fluorescent pigments.