An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, May 8, 2026
Contributed by Bill Arning / Sometimes the architecture of an exhibition space draws out qualities in an artist’s work that might remain latent elsewhere. Katherine Umsted is a familiar presence in the Hudson Valley art scene, known for an overflowing aesthetic of massive, boat-like vessels on the verge of collapse, constructed from rough-and-ready materials that could evidence a 2026 reincarnation of Arte Povera. It is hard to imagine a less suitable setting for such work than…
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Maureen Dougherty brings her paintings to life with quiet assurance. For “The Completionists,” her current exhibition at Mendes Wood DM in Germantown, she presents portraits of solitary collectors showcasing their collections in muted yet elegant tones not unlike Luc Tuymans’, with dabs of paint nestled into shadows and on tips of asparagus. Objects such as dog figurines, serving dishes, Picasso’s ceramics, skulls, and books are dutifully balanced on horizontal bands of shelving stretching across the picture plane, providing a fixed compositional framework. Perhaps Dougherty’s years of working in abstraction cultivated the acuity and freedom in her brushstroke. Nearly every one of the nine paintings on view fills the expanse of canvas as if to suggest that we’ve zoomed in on a larger presentation, singling out this particular person with this particular array of belongings while also understanding the moment as memory.
Contributed by Rick Briggs / If I’m being completely honest, for years I never completely got the work of Anke Weyer. Sure, she’s always had all the right moves – bold color, loose paint handling, and a juicy surface, all of which gave her work directness, spontaneity, and immediacy – but something felt off. The color was mostly discordant, and the gesture appeared merely aggressive, with an attitude that seemed anarchistic, almost like a form of punk nihilism. My perception began to change with “Nocturnes,” Weyer’s 2024 show at CANADA. I noticed the paintings began to slow down with masses of organic color shapes in works like Lucky, Sleepless and Monster.
Contributed by Mary Sargent / There is something endearingly ambitious about an exhibition that takes the human body not as subject matter but as unifying argument. “Figurative as Concept,” at A Space Gallery, was curated by Alina Khalitova, an artist who trained in art history in St. Petersburg, Russia, and currently divides her time between the United Kingdom and the United States. She assembled sixteen artists whose origins spanned, from east to west, China, India, Russia, Germany, Italy, and the United States. The wide geographic sweep was integral to the show. Every tradition represented has its own history of what and how the figure represents.
Contributed by David Carrier / Ernst Gombrich’s The Story of Art opens with a surprising juxtaposition of two drawings. One portrays Rubens’ handsome little son, the other Dürer’s aged mother. Of the latter Gombrich says: “His truthful study of careworn old age may give us a shock which makes us turn away from it – and yet, if we fight against our first repugnance we may be richly rewarded, for Dürer’s drawing in its tremendous sincerity is a great work.” Gombrich was, to be sure, a conceptually conservative art historian. But this declaration is a perfect introduction to the once iconoclastic Joan Semmel’s “In the Flesh,” now on view at the Jewish Museum.
Yes, we have art fairs in town this month, and I’m looking forward to swinging by ESTHER III, a kind of alternative embodiment of the concept at Estonian House on 243 E. 34th Street from May 13–16. Thomas Erben is bringing work by Mike Cloud and a few of my other favorite NYC galleries will be there, King’s Leap among them. Reserve free tickets now. Also on the must-see list this month is “The Moment and the Distance,” a big Helen Frankenthaler solo at Gagosian,…
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The Hudson Valley art scene is ramping up for the summer season with some great exhibitions opening this month. Requited Configurations opens at RUTHANN on May 1 with work by Natalie Beall, Charlotte Beckett, Damien Davis, Mark Dion, Shanti Grumbine, Nicholas Hamilton, Peter Hoffmeister, Jessi Li, David Lukowski, Scott Penkava, Monika Zarzeczna, and Steph Zimmerman. On May 2, openings include…
Contributed by Kenneth Greiner / On a recent trip to Japan, I visited Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art. Behind the museum’s massive burnt orange Torii gate, in the Higashiyama Cube, is its special exhibition, “Nihonga Avant-Garde: Kyoto 1948–1970” which, in the cube’s labyrinthine interior, encompasses three of Kyoto’s significant 20th-century avant-garde art movements (Pan Real, Cella Art Association, and the Sozo Bijutsu), propelled by a disaffection with traditional Nihonga painting.
Contributed by Tena Saw / Emily Kraus’s paintings are stuttering fields of glitches and agitation that shake and swagger like a Warhol Elvis. Her debut New York solo exhibition at Luhring Augustine Tribeca arrives with a kind of procedural mythology already attached. The artist works inside a self-designed apparatus, feeding raw canvas through rollers, painting in collaboration with the machine. The paintings come into being from pressure, friction, and chance.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The art caper is a rich sub-genre of the crime film, populated by some clever and inventive movies. Customarily, they’ve focused on the complexity of a heist; think of Topkapi, Gambit, or Oceans Twelve. More recent ones – The Best Offer, The Burnt Orange Heresy, and The Mastermind – have delved fastidiously into the mentalities of the thieves or fraudsters, and in particular their perverse but rarely inauthentic relationships to beauty. Now there’s one in that vein from Steven Soderbergh, who also directed Oceans Twelve. The Christophers is slick and penetrating…
Contributed by Matthew Logsdon / Upon entering “Leech,” Kari Cholnoky’s third solo exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, one of the first sculptures encountered is Conservation of Mass, a cranial-like form of smooth, peach-colored alabaster atop a steel pedestal. It is vertically symmetrical, with the most protruding elements centered like noses, creating a ribbed topography of ridges and recesses that suggest a face. The casual viewer is afforded just enough space between the sculpture and the wall to peek around the back of the piece but not enough to see it from eye level. An especially bold and engaged visitor, though, would find a wisdom tooth resting within a fleshy cavity. Is this the physical record of bodily alteration? Part of a strategy of removing superfluous body parts? Conservation of Mass embodies mortal life: confrontation, cat and mouse, meat and bone. There’s acknowledgment that sometimes something needs to be cut out to salvage the whole.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Few artists – even among those dedicated to the landscape – would look at a body of water and think, “OK, I’m going to spend the next 30 years painting this.” Yet, year by year, Eric Wolf has done just that, driven by a fascination with the daily transformation of water’s surface, its complementary relationship to air, its connection with people, and the peculiarly seductive power of black ink on paper. “Two Waters,” on view at Abri Mars, spans three decades of Wolf’s en plein air ink painting, which he did exclusively at two sites: a pond in Chatham, New York, and a lake in Rangeley, Maine.
Contributed by Bill Arning / “Self Made: A Century of Inventing,” now on view at the American Folk Art Museum, asks a thorny question: Why does the descriptive term “self-taught” continue to resonate so strongly with dedicated fans of folk and outsider art? At its most basic, the term describes artists who did not attend traditional art schools. To be sure, these institutions embody uneasy contradictions. Tasked with encouraging free expression, they simultaneously prepare artists to attract patronage by targeting the moneyed class. But at their best, they embed young artists in an ongoing, object-based cultural conversation. So why are we so drawn to work that emerges outside their influence?
Contributed by Sharon Butler / In May, Two Coats of Paint welcomes the return of Gyan Shrosbree from Fairfield, Iowa. Gyan, who had residencies in 2016 and 2017, makes clothing that she combines with twentieth-century modernist painting in an idiosyncratic and inventive practice that includes collaborative activities like sewing with her mother and staging exhibitions in the form of fashion shows. The closet, she declares, is her field of possibility. For Shrosbree, clothing is both practical and symbolic. It protects our bodies from the environment while projecting something about our inner life. It’s this duality that gives her bold paintings their emotional charge.
Contributed by Sutton Allen / With his show at Donald Ryan Gallery, E.M. Saniga join the esteemed company of artists who have eschewed fashion for the sake of personal vision. His real kin are Albert Pinkham Ryder and Courbet. He and Courbet are both interested in the raw beauty of country life yet also share an urbane sensibility. Saniga’s experience is made tactile through carefully modeled half tones and a calculated and surprising facture.
Katherine Umsted: Anything but seamlessMaureen Dougherty’s collectors: Pride without greedAnke Weyer: Flying freeBodies of work: The human figure as cultural constantJoan Semmel’s simple truth
NYC Selected Gallery Guide, May 2026Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, May 2026The Nihonga avant-garde’s cultural outreachEmily Kraus: Balancing control and surrenderThe Christophers: NFSKari Cholnoky: Stalking dullnessEric Wolf: Into the fog
