Mildred Thompson’s cosmic abstractions turn physics, astronomy, color, and electronic sound into a visual language for forces that cannot be seen.

What does a magnetic field look like?

What does radiation feel like?

And how might a painting translate the unimaginable scale of the universe into something human eyes can experience?

For Mildred Thompson, these were not simply scientific questions. They became the foundation for an extraordinary body of abstract work.

This fall, Galerie Lelong & Co. returns to Thompson’s cosmic vision with Mildred Thompson: Cosmos Calling, opening October 29 and continuing through December 19, 2026, at the gallery’s Chelsea location at 528 West 26th Street.

The exhibition arrives at a moment of renewed institutional attention to Thompson, an American artist whose four-decade practice moved fluidly between painting, sculpture, drawing, printmaking, assemblage, writing, and music.

Her subject was often something that could not be directly seen.

The invisible became visible through abstraction.

A Universe Inside the Canvas

Thompson was deeply interested in physics and astronomy and sought to develop a visual language for scientific systems and forces beyond ordinary perception.

Her paintings can appear to explode from their centers.

Radiating marks, swirling color, dense gestures, and layered structures create images that seem simultaneously microscopic and astronomical.

A Thompson painting can suggest a particle accelerating through space or an immense celestial body viewed from an impossible distance.

That ambiguity was fundamental to her practice.

Rather than illustrating science literally, she transformed scientific ideas into visual experiences.

Galerie Lelong describes her work as a continuing investigation into relationships in the universe, while noting her interest in using abstraction to engage with invisible scientific phenomena.

The result is not scientific illustration.

It is something closer to poetic cosmology.

Cosmos Calling and the Music of the Spheres

The title of the exhibition comes from Thompson’s own musical work.

During the 1990s, she developed the monumental Music of the Spheres paintings, a group of four works representing Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Mars.

Each painting was accompanied by an original electronic music composition created by Thompson.

Together, the compositions were titled Cosmos Calling.

The music was inspired by the NASA Voyager recordings and evoked the sonic atmosphere of science-fiction soundtracks while also connecting to Afrofuturist musical traditions.

This makes Thompson’s cosmic project fundamentally interdisciplinary.

The universe is not only painted.

It is heard.

Color becomes frequency.

Gesture becomes movement.

The painting becomes a kind of visual score.

Painting Physics

Thompson’s fascination with invisible forces intensified during the 1990s.

Her Magnetic Fields works investigate magnetism through energetic fields of color and movement. Her Radiation Explorations series, meanwhile, translates radiation and ultraviolet light into luminous colors and gestural brushwork.

Other paintings engage with particle physics and quantum mechanics, including String Theory (1999).

These titles are important because they reveal how Thompson used scientific vocabulary without surrendering the freedom of abstraction.

A magnetic field does not have a conventional visual appearance.

Neither does quantum mechanics.

Thompson therefore had to invent one.

Her swirling forms suggest forces acting upon one another rather than depicting recognizable objects. The paintings become speculative visual models—ways of imagining phenomena that exist beyond direct human perception.

From the Microscopic to the Infinite

One of the most remarkable characteristics of Thompson’s practice is its ability to move between radically different scales.

Her work could address the human body, architecture, microscopic particles, magnetic forces, planets, and the vastness of space.

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami’s 2025 exhibition Mildred Thompson: Frequencies brought together approximately fifty works spanning 1959–1999 and emphasized precisely this movement across scales.

That exhibition also presented a significant selection from Thompson’s Heliocentric Series of approximately 1990–94 alongside the Music of the Spheres paintings.

Together, the works revealed an artist attempting to construct relationships between things that appear impossibly distant.

The microscopic and the cosmic become part of the same visual universe.

A Career Between Continents

Thompson’s biography is equally important to understanding her place in American art history.

Born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1936, she studied at Howard University, the Brooklyn Museum School, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg.

She later spent substantial periods living and working in Germany and France.

Her career developed across continents and disciplines, while the American art world often failed to give her work the attention it deserved.

Her practice eventually included not only painting and sculpture but writing, poetry, music, and teaching. Thompson also served as associate editor of ART PAPERS from 1989 to 1997 and performed music with her partner Donna Jackson under the name WedoBLUES.

That interdisciplinary identity complicates any attempt to place her neatly within a single category.

She was an abstractionist, but also a musician.

She was fascinated by science, but worked through intuition.

She was deeply engaged with material processes, but imagined phenomena beyond the physical world.

Wood, Space, and the Architecture of Matter

Thompson’s cosmic paintings are only one part of her larger artistic vocabulary.

She also worked extensively with wood, producing reliefs, two- and three-dimensional collages, and outdoor assemblages.

Her Wood Pictures used salvaged material to create structures that could recall architectural façades, fragments, or abstract constructions.

The relationship between material and memory remained central.

Wood carried history.

Its texture, scars, grain, and irregularities became part of the composition.

The physical object and the imagined universe therefore coexisted within Thompson’s practice.

This is one reason her work cannot be reduced to “space art.”

The cosmos was a conceptual framework, but Thompson was always working through tangible materials.

An Artist Whose Time Has Come Again

The renewed attention to Thompson has accelerated in recent years.

Her work has entered major collections including the Brooklyn Museum, Glenstone, Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

In 2025, ICA Miami presented Frequencies, described by the institution as the most comprehensive solo museum exhibition of Thompson’s work to date.

Her work has also appeared in broader exhibitions examining American abstraction and the histories of women artists and artists of color.

That institutional reassessment provides important context for Cosmos Calling.

The exhibition is not simply an opportunity to revisit a historical artist.

It reflects a larger shift in how twentieth-century abstraction is being reconsidered—particularly the work of artists whose practices do not fit comfortably into the traditional narratives of American art history.

The Sound of Space

There is something particularly fitting about bringing Cosmos Calling to New York in 2026.

Contemporary culture has become increasingly fascinated with space, astrophysics, artificial intelligence, quantum theory, and the possibility of life beyond Earth.

Yet Thompson approached these subjects decades ago without depending on digital visualization.

She had paint.

Wood.

Paper.

Sound.

Color.

And imagination.

Her achievement was to turn those relatively direct materials into instruments for contemplating phenomena that exist at extraordinary scales.

Her cosmos is therefore neither purely scientific nor purely mystical.

It occupies a space between knowledge and wonder.

Looking Beyond the Visible

Mildred Thompson: Cosmos Calling ultimately asks viewers to reconsider what abstraction can do.

A painting does not need to depict a planet to make us think about planetary systems.

It does not need to reproduce a particle to suggest its movement.

It does not need to photograph radiation to make invisible energy feel present.

Thompson understood that abstraction could function as a form of speculation.

Her paintings are not pictures of the universe.

They are attempts to imagine its relationships.

And when the accompanying music enters the equation, the project becomes even more expansive.

The canvas becomes a visual frequency.

The composition becomes a vibration.

The gallery becomes a listening space.

The universe becomes something that can be approached not through literal representation, but through sensation.

That is the lasting power of Thompson’s Cosmos Calling.

She did not simply paint outer space.

She tried to make the invisible feel visible—and the distant feel close.