THRESHOLD OF STONE: Exploring the Physical, Political and Artistic Multiplicity of Walls

Dimitra Lazaridou / Ben Marcin / Brian P. Miller Bernd Radtke / Leland Rice

ON VIEW SEPTEMBER 10 - OCTOBER 31 2026

OPENING RECEPTION THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 6:00 - 9:00 PM

LOCATION MARYLAND ART PLACE, 5TH FLOOR

C. Grimaldis Gallery and Catalyst Contemporary are pleased to present Threshold of Stone: Exploring the Physical, Political and Artistic Multiplicity of Walls, a collaborative, photographic exhibition at Maryland Art Place, featuring works by Dimitra Lazaridou, Ben Marcin, Brian P. Miller, Bernd Radtke, and Leland Rice. The exhibition investigates the concept of walls as mundane yet powerful, political and psychological symbols. We live with these structures that can both isolate and protect, bear witness and imprison, carry the marks of human contact, and carry the weight of division.

Bringing together five artists whose practices investigate surface, memory, and place, Threshold of Stone approaches the wall as both a material fact and allegorical partition. Through photography, the artists depict walls as sites where public and private space meet, where histories are concealed or exposed, and where traces of human presence accumulate through weathering, inscription, repair, erasure, and time.

Dimitra Lazaridou, whose large-scale works in this exhibition come from her "Without Borders" series, approaches the wall through the language of the city. Her images focus on architectural surfaces, stairways, barriers, thresholds, and urban fragments, presenting the wall as both a physical structure and a charged site of separation, passage, memory, and human presence. These photographs draw viewers into a shared experiences of urban solitude, tension, and conflict.

Leland Rice, who considers himself a visual archeologist, photographed the West German side of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s, where pictographs, poems, slogans, and fragments of expression gather across stone and concrete. Rather than treating the Wall as a mere fixed boundary between East and West, Rice reveals it as an active surface, marked by resistance, anxiety, and the urgency to speak across division. 

Bernd Radtke photographs architectural fragments with quiet attention to place, atmosphere, and time. His images often begin with ordinary moments, composed of light, shadow, weather, color, surface, and form, yet they carry memory, tension, and history. In his work, walls and stones feel like witnesses: thresholds between presence and absence; a quiet record of what is sensed and preserved in passing. 

Ben Marcin’s photographs consider architecture as a witness to demographic change and the persistence of memory within the built environment. These particular works have emerged from a more straightforward approach to the two-dimensional space but now live in an abstract dimension, like carefully calculated, colorfield paintings.

Brian Miller approaches walls for the evidence they confess of manmade environments, where public displays of vandalism and free expression occur, where the wall is fortified architecture as much as it is a pliable, reusable, ever-changing canvas. His work, mainly from New York City & Miami in this show, skirts documentary but wraps the visual experience in an abstract and compositional fabric. 

Presented by C. Grimaldis Gallery and Catalyst Contemporary, Threshold of Stone reflects a shared interest in photography’s ability to hold both evidence and ambiguity. Across the exhibition, depictions of walls become meditations on division, endurance, the passage of time and changing perception, and, ultimately, traces left behind by human contact. In a time of many literal and metaphorical “walls”, the show is an appeal to viewers, as much as a reminder of the manner in which these structures impact our lives.

Threshold of Stone: Exploring the Physical, Political and Artistic Multiplicity of Walls will be on view at Maryland Art Place’s 5th Floor Gallery from September 10 through October 31, 2026. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, September 10, 2026. Maryland Art Place is located at 218 West Saratoga Street, Baltimore, MD 21201. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12:00 to 4:00 PM. Please contact C. Grimaldis Gallery or Catalyst Contemporary for personal tours of the show.

C. Grimaldis Gallery has continuously operated in Baltimore since 1977. The gallery specializes in postwar American and European art with an emphasis on contemporary sculpture. C. Grimaldis Gallery is located at The Mill Centre, 3000 Chestnut Avenue, Suite 205, Baltimore, MD 21211.

Catalyst Contemporary is a fine art advisory and exhibition production company in Baltimore, representing artists internationally and focused on contemporary art of all mediums that tell stories. Contact Address: 33 E 21st Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218.