Author: Two Coats Staff

Artist's Notebook

Sharon’s Substack / December 4, 2025

Contributed by Sharon Butler / A few days after the final 2025 Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist left, I packed a bag and tagged along with the editor on a short trip to Dublin. He had a non-art-related conference, and I so I walked around the city, admiring countless wool tweeds and hand-knit sweaters, checking out art, and catching up with friends. When we got back, he wrote about Stephanie Deady’s painting show at Kevin Kananvaugh, and I tackled Alan Butler’s mind-spinning data-driven spectacle at Green on Red.

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Gallery Guides Gallery shows NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide, December 2025

Hello, December! I’m grateful to everyone who has already supported Two Coats of Paint 2025 Year-end Fundraising Campaign. With roughly four weeks left, we still need additional contributions to fund 2026. If you haven’t yet donated, I encourage you to consider making your tax-deductible gift now. For two decades, I’ve managed to sustain Two Coats of Paint on a lean…

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Group Shows

Summoning, Conjuring, Coaxing: A trend emerges in Bushwick

Contributed by Lucas Moran / Maybe death isn’t final but simply a door leading into another room. That feeling ran through “Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” an excellent group show at Active Space in Bushwick curated by Patrick Bower and Robert Zurer of Immaterial Projects. It tapped into whatever lies just beyond perception: the subconscious, the occult, the spirits, the talismans, the circus freaks. Everything half-seen or half-remembered was allowed to take shape. If contemporary painting has drifted away from figuration and identity, this show suggested we may be heading towards something more concealed – art that conjures rather than describes, call it hiddenist painting, embracing what is buried, invisible, or occulted, where death, memory, and imagination loop into one.

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Solo Shows

Stephanie Deady and the structure of intimacy

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Stephanie Deady’s coolly seductive oil-on-birchwood paintings now on display at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin – all archly titled, like the show itself, Emotional Calculus – draw you in like mirages of serenity. For that purpose, they incisively deploy beauty: tawny, fluid backgrounds envelop rhythmically interacting shapes of red, blue, or white, lending each package of images visual harmony and compositional stability. In due course, the paintings reveal deeper intent, which is to complicate and enrich your ultimate apprehension of the presumptively simple life.

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Solo Shows

Shirin Mirjamali’s exquisite intensity

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The Iranian government has looked askance at political assertiveness and social progressivism since the revolution of 1979. The pressure under which women operate is especially heavy. Political protest, however, cannot be a way of life. Day to day, Iranians are compelled to avoid confrontations that could place them in jeopardy, discreetly acknowledging anguish and resolving to sublimate it. Shirin Mirjamali, whose exquisitely intense works on paper are now on display in her solo show “Hidden Longing” at Anita Rogers Gallery, exemplifies this essentially pensive disposition.

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Group Shows

The enduring resonance of Supports/Surfaces

Contributed by Marjorie Welish / The group show “Fold, Drape, Repeat” now up at Ceysson & Bénétière does what it says. A select showing of work by the loosely aggregated French collective Supports/Surfaces, the exhibition embodies the very assembly involved in making art. Offbeat maneuver never succumbs to product or merchandise. Put another way, each individual artist emphasizes how the construction of art respects the commonplace materials at hand.

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Resident Artist

Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist: Joseph Smolinski, November 9–14

Contributed by Sharon Butler / From November 9 to 14, Two Coats of Paint will host Joseph Smolinski, a multidisciplinary artist and educator born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, and based in New Haven, Connecticut. Over the past 15 years, his research-based work has explored how communication networks, energy and oil industries, and industrial agriculture infrastructure fundamentally shape both our conception of “the natural environment” and its physical reality.

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Studio Visit

Libby Braden’s twilight disturbia

Contributed by Patrick Neal / The artist Libby Braden lives and works in an old East Village tenement apartment that recalls the austere bohemian enclaves of James Baldwin’s Another Country or Jonathan Larson’s Rent. Braden, who moved there in the early nineties, has embraced an essentially nocturnal existence. She logs onto the computer to begin her remote position as a financial administrator around midnight, finishing up with enough hours in the day to work on her drawing and painting before going to bed at around 4 PM. She is fully aware of parallels between the conventions of an ordinary office job and her own representational aesthetic. Both are grounded and populated, with ego, id, and superego mingling and overlapping in a circadian rhythm of awareness and unconsciousness.

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Gallery Guides NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide, October, 2025

Welcome to the Two Coats of Paint October selected guide to painting-centric exhibitions in New York, Brooklyn, and Queens. We’ll be updating the listings around mid-month, so if you want your show considered for inclusion, please send info about the show to staff@twocoatsofpaint.com. NOTE: The year-end fundraising campaign starts in a few weeks, but readers who want to get a headstart can make a tax-deductible contribution here. Thank you!

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Solo Shows

Paul Gardère’s prescient eclecticism

Contributed by Adam Simon / Paul Gardère (1944–2011), whose work is now on view in “Second Nature” at Magenta Plains, is known for a unique version of combine paintings, incorporating assemblage, found objects, photography, dirt and glitter into works that critique the legacy of colonialism in Haiti and its diaspora. The problem with this narrative is that it undersells how formally innovative his work was in its time, the degree to which it stems from his own biography, and how it anticipated our current multi-screen reality.

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