Martyn Cross has always revered paintings. “They are things that in their creation are held and caressed and physically roughed-up,” he has said. “All with the intention of creating some kind of surface history.” Born in 1975 in Yate, England, Cross’s work is intentionally ambiguous. He likes to let viewers craft their own explanations for images drawn from medieval culture, and his body of work ranges from very small paintings to canvases that are monumental in scale. In his third solo exhibition with Marianne Boesky, he presents unsettling landscapes that suggest humankind’s emergence from the Earth’s mud and clay, as in the myth of Prometheus and the Epic of Gilgamesh. These paintings comprise Cross’s own creation myth. —Maggie Turner