Contributed by Sharon Butler / It’s February and my head is already spinning. I saw a few shows yesterday and recommend a trip to 15 Orient on 72 Walker Street (enter on Cortlandt Alley) to see Mitchell Kehe’s show “Bonded by the Spirit of Doubt,” in which enigmatic composition seems to affirm and concretize the pit I feel in my stomach. If narrative is more your jam, stop by LUNCH, a pop-up space downstairs from NADA headquarters at 311 East Broadway. Bill Arning has curated a show called “Ambiguous Storytellers” featuring Hannah Barrett, Tyler Brandon, Ario Elami, Matthew Gilbert, T.J. Griffin, Paula Hayes, Brian Kenny, Phil Knoll, Steven Lack, Jean Paul Mallozzi, Daniel Morowitz, Donna Moylan, Rajab Ali Sayed, and Erik Daniel White. Don’t miss Hilary Harnischfeger’s “Song for Clouds,” the artist’s fifth exhibition at Uffner & Liu. She crafts handmade objects that uncannily reflect the geological processes of tectonic pressure, sediment layering, and mineral buildup. Two Coats fave Alex Kwartler returns to Magenta Plains with “Off-Peak,” a solo show in which he presents “an inventory of passing attentions” that perfectly capture this age of distraction.
Author: Two Coats Staff
Sharon’s Substack / February 1, 2026
The “Sell America” trade, Spot On, Street Corner Conversations, Insomnia Project, Visual Quitter, and Two Coats of Paint Resident Artist Craig Drennen arrives this month….
NYC Selected Gallery Guide, January 2026
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Because of you, Two Coats of Paint will continue to thrive in 2026. Your contributions will enable us to continue producing these painting-centric monthly gallery guides that help the painting community discover exhibitions in New York City, the Hudson Valley, and beyond. Cheers to another year of great art, great writing, and great community, despite the dark days ahead….
Sharon’s Substack / January 3, 2026
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Invitations, dates, details — McBride/Dillman, CLEA RSKY, 68 Prince Street Gallery in Kingston, the first Open Studio of 2026. This piece was originally published in Sharon Butler Notebooks on Substack.
Robert Storr, at the margins
Contributed by Marjorie Welish / Robert Storr’s canvases are designed to counter expectations and require us to discard habitual taste. Disequilibrium reigns in abstract compositions exploiting the inexhaustible potential of the basic unit of the square. To keep the viewer alert, he employs novel moves and tactics, inserting an eye-catching red block within otherwise black and white interlocking compositions. But Storr’s paintings, on view at Vito Schnabel through January 17, are not about color, or even about perception and finesse bestowed to a surface. Rather, color for him is a signal to attend to a structural remit for composition.
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.
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…
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.
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.
Support Two Coats of Paint’s Year-end Campaign
Many thanks to those who have contributed to Two Coats of Paint’s 2025 Year-end Campaign. About five weeks remain, and we could use quite a bit more help. For those who have not yet made a move, I urge you to make your tax-deductible contribution soon.
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.
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.
Sharon’s Substack / November 5, 2025
Contributed by Sharon Butler / If you follow me on Instagram, you probably noticed that the new paintings have been stacking up in the studio […]
NYC Selected Gallery Guide, November 2025
Welcome to the Two Coats of Paint November selected guide to painting-centric exhibitions in New York, Brooklyn, and Queens….
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.
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.
Sharon’s Substack / October 6, 2025
Contributed by Sharon Butler / The 2025 brain drain predicted last November appears to be well underway. In the last few months, I’ve had artist friends pack up and leave the city for Taiwan, Scotland, Ireland, London, Portugal, Spain, and most recently Paris.
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!
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.
Apply now for the 2026 Two Coats Residency Program
DEADLINE to send a letter of interest for a 2026 residency is October 30, 2025. / Over the years, intimate, artist-run residency programs have helped move artists’ work forward in unexpected ways….













































