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.
Shrosbree’s work calls to mind the Meisner Technique, developed by acting teacher Sanford Meisner. The premise is simple: live truthfully in imaginary circumstances. He taught actors to focus on their scene partner and what was happening in the moment instead of mining memory for emotion. They can then respond with increasing spontaneity until they stop performing and simply behave free of artifice. This amounts to creative surrender, allowing drama to emerge naturally, without being forced. Shrosbree’s approach to painting manifests a similar devotion to process and presence. Her studio practice, she says, is governed by a “low-stakes, generative attitude.” Like the Meisner-trained actor who trusts the moment over the script, she privileges the act of making over any predetermined result. Through it, “the ideas emerge.” The work is discovered rather than engineered.
Shrosbree approaches the tradition of painting critically, using an intersectional feminist lens to revise modernism’s visual language. Flattening pictorial space and utilizing modularity and humor are key strategies. Works cumulatively meet, shift, and recombine. Like Meisner’s actors finding scenes anew each night, her installations and performances remain fluid and mutable. Rob Samartino, considering her 2023 show at Ortega y Gasset Projects for Two Coats of Paint, captured the uncannily hopeful quality of her work: “Despite their fluorescent intensity, there is something refreshingly archaic about these paintings: they have the ritual stiffness of a new civilization.”
84 x 120 inches
dimensions variable/block of drawings is 96 x 72 inches
About the artist: Gyan Shrosbree received her B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute, and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has had recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY; Laisun Keane, Boston, MA; JEFF, Marfa, TX. Residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, The Vermont Studio Center, Two Coats of Paint, and The Maple Terrace. She lives and works in Fairfield, IA, and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Fine Arts at Maharishi International University.
Gyan ShrosbreeTwo Coats of Paint Artist Residency, 22-19 41st Avenue, 6th Floor, Studio #10, Long Island City, NY. May 5 – 10, 2026. Open Studio: Wednesday, May 6, 5–7 pm. For more info or to schedule a visit, email STAFF@twocoatsofpaint.com with STUDIO VISIT in the subject. Follow Gyan on Instagram @gyanshrosbree
Upcoming shows:
Gladiatrix
Group show curated by Manuela Paz
EMBAJADA, San Juan. PR
Opening April 25, 2026
Solo show, The Evanston Art Center, Evanston, IL
2027
Solo show, Gallery 1308, Union South, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI.
January-March 2027
Studio playlist: The music from Gyan’s Runway Show
About the author: Sharon Butler is a painter, publisher of Two Coats of Paint, and director of the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program.
