A visual paean to New York at A Space

Contributed by Mary Sargent / John Berger declared that every image embodies a way of seeing, and the way that images gathered in “Amongst Other Things,” a recent group exhibition at A Space, embody is slow, sustained, and irreducibly human. The premise of the show was simple and deliberately unfashionable: to depict the landscape of New York through direct, on-site observation. Each of the twenty artists’ works channels a span of looking that may have taken hours, in the manner of artists such as Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, and David Hockney, who spent decades exploring and refining it. As they record their surroundings in paint, the canvases accumulate memories and feelings.

Lola Alimova mixes it up, including both drawing and painting in her canvases. She scales oil pastel up to 30 by 40 inches until it carries the density of a painting. In Pier 55 (2023) she works the line as her primary structure, building the surface through a push and pull of buried and recovered marks, color laid over scribble until the drawn understructure fights its way back through. Brigitte Bentele treats each watercolor as a vessel of experience, distilling a landscape to its emotional core. Kalpana Goel follows light and stillness from New York to Venice, finding a shared contemplative quality. Nobuko Kobayashi maps the quiet meeting places that proliferate as steel gives way to greenery across Long Island City and Astoria Park. Andriy Kovalevych, a production artist who left Ukraine, paints historic sites like the Met Cloisters, opting out of the digital grind. Cindy Fan, frustrated by what photography leaves out, lets the physical conditions of the moment inhabit the work – cooler tones because she was cold, swaying lines because the branches were moving. Iryna Minof works small and fast in a quiet corner of Central Park, trusting the raw, unedited moment. Margarita Shuvaeva applies paint fast and loose. In works like Marine Park (2025), she drags and scrapes the surface so that what at first reads as a field or treeline ultimately slides toward dissolution. She works raku ceramics as well as painting and carries the unpredictability of the kiln into the way she handles paint, pushing each surface until the material resolves into something unanticipated. Eve Schoeffler enhances ordinary moments with unexpected color. Yoshika Takezawa gathers the moving elements of a landscape into a single cohesive image. Shawne Cooper blends watercolor, drawing, and handwritten text, chasing the hidden narratives behind both iconic landmarks and standard storefronts. Alexis A. Marino combines on-site studies and anatomical allusion into humanistic forms.

Novel creative inspirations and practical approaches often come into play. Stephen Galiczynski focuses on the unappreciated geometry of fire escapes and other urban configurations. Joanne Herb left the studio still-life for the street precisely to sharpen her powers of observation. Rosalind M Bunting wheeled her entire studio into the heart of Fort Greene, forging community on the pavement. Patricia Chow uses urban sketching as relief from the intellectual pressure of her large-scale installation work. Valeriya Nochovnaya stretches and primes her own canvases, calibrating the weave and absorbency so that the surface shapes how the paint will settle. In Central Park (2025), she thins her oils so heavily with white spirit that they pool and stain like watercolor, creating washes convincing enough that viewers routinely refuse to believe the work is oil at all. Precious O. Utobunwa-Nwachukwu, the youngest artist in the show, sketches in permanent fine-liner and writes his doubts into the margins, closing each drawing with a time stamp. Okim Woo Kim confronts her subjects on site and moves past description towards distilled emotion. For Karyna Castro too, people are the most dynamic element the city offers.

Henry James once observed that the greatest art is the art of life itself – the endeavor to be one on whom nothing is lost. These twenty artists underline that idea. The show argues, quietly and persistently, that the most truthful image of a place is the one that subsumes the most intent observation.

“Amongst Other Things,” curated by Insiya Pardiwala, founder of Plein-Air Painters of NYC, in collaboration with A Space, 13 Grattan Street, #402, Brooklyn, NY. June 5–June 6, 2026. Artists: Lola Alimova, Brigitte Bentele, Rosalind M Bunting, Karyna Castro, Patricia Chow, Shawne Cooper, Cindy Fan, Stephen Galiczynski, Kalpana Goel, Joanne Herb, Okim Woo Kim, Nobuko Kobayashi, Andriy Kovalevych, Alexis A. Marino, Iryna Minof, Valeriya Nochovnaya, Eve Schoeffler, Margarita Shuvaeva, Yoshika Takezawa, and Precious O. Utobunwa-Nwachukwu. On June 6, a panel discussion organized by Artmetod focused on making art from observation.

About the author: Mary Sargent is a writer and contributor to Two Coats of Paint.