Contributed by Bill Arning / Private Public Gallery has earned its reputation for mounting deeply considered exhibitions of painting that honor artists who have spent decades refining their own private grammars of mark and color. Entered through a small garden – an architectural prelude that feels almost ceremonial – the gallery offers a perfect threshold for work that rewards slow, attentive looking. “Here, Elsewhere,” Kylie Heidenheimer’s first solo exhibition there, is fully in that lineage. Working with Chris Freeman, the gallery’s proprietor and an artist/gallerist in the Betty Parsons tradition, Heidenheimer has conceived a taut, resonant statement: six large-scale abstractions flanking the room and, anchoring the space like a cinematic overture, and one monumental diptych.
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The diptych, Swell, spanning ten feet across its two panels, stands slightly apart from its companions – out of step with Heidenheimer’s usual strategies and all the more striking for it. The painting unfolds as a rising, breathing symphony of greens and blues, irresistibly landscape-inflected. The experience is luscious and consoling; the eye enters, drifts, and rests in washes of atmospheric calm. The unpainted lower-right section, rather than reading as void or rupture, becomes a kind of oasis, a meditative clearing. In Park, prompted by a recent visit to Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, one might expect Swell’s lyric quiet to continue. In fact, however, Swell is the only work in the show that resists Heidenheimer’s signature interior contradiction. In Park and elsewhere, she makes a mark only to hunt, mischievously, for the least predictable rejoinder. The painting crackles with carnival clamor – rides, thrills, chromatic noise. She seems temperamentally drawn not to pastoral reverie but to the ecstatic dissonances of free jazz.
The four 75 × 60-inch works along the side walls tease us with nearly but never quite reconcilable kinships. The gallery has hung the most divergent pair side-by-side. The sepulchral, black-and-white Chasm, a gloomy atmospheric descent, rubs shoulders with Net, all staccato verticals, looping outlines, splashes, and jubilant color. One senses the same hand, but also the mercurial weather of Heidenheimer’s studio days. A shared trait – if any can be claimed – is her recurring use of a subtle architectural latticework on which the paint performs its improvisations. Though it risks reading as a modernist trope, the scaffold quickly dissolves into the background as more voluptuous decisions seize your attention.
In his erudite, theory-steeped essay for “Here, Elsewhere,” Tom McGlynn observes: “Rather than evincing a limit, Heidenheimer’s labile approach imbues her canvases with a sense of vital, perpetual becoming.” That feels exactly right. Not unlike the seductively unstable abstractions of Amy Sillman, Keltie Ferris, Charlene von Heyl, or Matt Connors, Heidenheimer’s paintings work against the viewer’s instinct to categorize. They slow perception, invite list-making, and demand a kind of pleasurable forensic engagement: what on earth compelled her to place this mark next to that one? I often failed to reverse-engineer the logic. Her internal monologue seems to whisper, “These don’t belong together, so let’s see what happens.”
Rather than describe any single canvas – an almost impossible task – I found joy in trying to determine the sequence of her gestures. In several works, she overlays a full, authoritative brushstroke with another patch of paint nearly identical in scale, causing the form to shift hue once, twice, even three times. The effect is deliciously impish, as though she were taunting the very idea of painterly certainty. Heidenheimer is a beloved presence in the Hudson Valley painting community, and “Here, Elsewhere” marks her most assured, generous, and quietly audacious effort yet – a celebration of intent, play, and the infinite pleasures of looking.
“Kylie Heidenheimer: Here Elsewhere,” Private Public Gallery, 530 Columbia Street, Hudson, NY. Through January 11, 2026
About the author: Bill Arning is a curator, critic, advisor, writer, and itinerant maker of pop up shows based in Old Chatham, New York.
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Like the entrance at Private Public, these words offer a threshold into the sumptuous but resistant paintings they describe. A tab to keep open…
A perfect match, the show and Bill’s commentary! Clear thinking all the way through.
The best art writing makes you want to run out and see the show. I need to check the train schedule!
Bill’s translating your paintings into words are a perfect partnership to what we see. He describes what what it must feel like to paint them.
This was the most surprising, beautiful, articulate and insightful analysis of Kylie’s work.