Contributed by Karlyn Benson / February’s highlights include the opening of Geary’s new location in Salisbury, Connecticut with a solo show of paintings by Alan Prazniak. On February 6, Souvenir, a group exhibition curated by Jeff Bailey opens at RUTHANN in Catskill. Numerous exhibitions are opening on February 7, including Terrestrial Extra at the Dorsky Museum, guest-curated by Alta Buden and Craig Monteith of Roundabouts Now. The same evening there are openings at Headstone (Above Board Ceramics), 68 Prince Street (Sharon Butler, Jason Travers, Kieran Kinsella, Murray Hochman, and Eileen Power), Distortion Society (Spaces Between Color) the Garrison Art Center (Stephanie Garmey and Michael Prettyman) and Buster Levi’s final show Open Ending….
Gallery shows
Lucas Blalock and Julia Rommel’s well-oiled machine
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Consider the hunk as a deliberate, usable form, as Julia Rommel does. Her paintings are hunks of color painted on linen – cut up, unstretched, and stapled into off-the-air color TV bars. They are as much about labor as color. Each painting feels as though it was sledgehammered into the wall just before you walked in the room, still ringing from the strike. Flanking Rommel through the show is Lucas Blalock, photographer. His photos operate similarly, offering an easy, even fun, seduction that segues into discovery as you find out how he’s tricked you. Images are cut and layered over one another, details are hidden. The viewer is rewarded for close, patient attention, as in an I Spy book.
A nocturnal dance at Springs Projects
Contributed by Patrick Neal / As we orbit Winter Solstice, marking the shortest days, longest nights, and coldest temperatures of the year, along comes the perfectly timed exhibition, “Night Traveling in the Early Country of the Imagination” at Springs Projects in Dumbo. The show, which presents the work of multimedia artists Donna Dennis and Tommy Hartung, is dark, atmospheric, and hauntingly beautiful, evoking the season’s long shadows, monochrome palette, and stark beauty.
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….
A penchant for belonging: Biala’s Paris
Contributed by Rebecca Allan / Just off rue de Jarente in the Marais, Galerie Pavec – which late last year presented “L’Esprit Français,” the first […]
Alex Katz’s seas of orange
Contributed by Tena Saw / Ninety-eight-year-old Alex Katz’s current gem of an exhibition at Gladstone consists of eleven orange and white canvases, each ten and a half feet high, that wrap around the main gallery. All reference a road in Maine where Katz spends summers. Unlike most of his work, they lean heavily towards abstraction, treating the road like an opportunity to explore perspective or the light on the leaves. Particularly if you’re lucky enough be alone in the gallery – a single room of high white walls, industrial scaffold ceiling, and enormous skylights – it becomes a kind of meditation tank, containing a sea of optical orange. Natural light settles on the paintings like a mist. The effect is more akin to that of an installation than that of a traditional painting show.
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…
Jodie Manasevit’s minimalist portent
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Until viewing the concurrent exhibitions up now – one at Mario Diacono Gallery in Boston, the other at Ghostmachine in New York – the last time saw I so many of Jodie Manasevit’s fine, fierce paintings was at the start of 2020, in a previous incarnation of artist-curator David Dixon’s Cathouse Proper project space in Carroll Gardens.
A lesson in art at Duckworth Gallery
Contributed by Anna Gregor / It is a relief when the curator of a group show doesn’t tell viewers how to understand the work selected […]
The Tomayko Foundation: Four artists and the promise of Pittsburgh
Contributed by David Carrier / Sobia Ahmad makes silver fiber prints and inkjet images responding to Sufi traditions of poetry and oral storytelling. Her The Breath within the Breath is a 30-foot-long inkjet print on Japanese paper, mounted on a platform running diagonally across the gallery. Maggie Bjorklund does oil paintings. Her Assumption of the Virgin (After Titian) is a close-up rendering of that subject. Centa Schumacher manipulates photographic images, and her Salt Fork, Rain on Lake superimposes a white circle on an archival inkjet print. Elijah Burger had developed private codes of quasi-abstract images, like Hex Centrifuge. The unifying theme of the four-artist exhibition “I Believe I Know” that includes this work, now up at the Tomayko Foundation in Pittsburgh, is concern with transcendence. With due reference to William James’s The Variety of Religious Experience, the four artists’ shared goal is to offer visual presentations of mystical experiences. That is a familiar and traditional modernist theme, but here it receives strikingly original treatment.
A Golden year: Art amid iniquity
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / For a group show keyed to current events, the trick is to balance political messaging with the stream of life, achieving provocative encapsulation without preachiness. “Made in Paint, Twelve” at the Sam & Adele Golden Gallery of Art, situated in the legendary Golden Artist Colors paint factory in New Berlin, New York, pulls this off with style and heart.
Widening circles at McKenzie Fine Art
Contributed by Katarina Wong / In the heat of summer, “Curvilinear Abstraction” at McKenzie Fine Art is a bracing group show that takes the viewer on a journey by turns lyrical, cosmic, regenerative, and intimate, calling on the imagination as much as formal appreciation.
We happy few: Band of sisters at Lubov
Contributed by Amanda Church / Happiness is … three dynamic, joy-producing artists under one roof, a phenomenon realized by curator José Freire in the three-person show “Acquaintance” – Episode One of the Happiness Project – at Lubov Gallery in Chinatown. The show brings together Linda Daniels, Marilyn Lerner, and Jill Levine, all of whom showed at some point with Freire at Fiction/Nonfiction in the East Village in the late 1980s or thereafter after at Team in Soho. This show marks Freire’s first curatorial project since Team closed in 2020, and the spirit is upbeat and sanguine, in line with Pharrell Williams’ exhortation to “clap along if you know what happiness is to you.”
Allen Berke and Lise Soskolne: A world distorted
Contributed by David Whelan / “Esthetic Bomb Shelter,” at Ulrik gallery, comes at a time of overwhelming crisis. Conflict and hostility seem to have entered every aspect of life without clear exits. Painters Allen Berke and Lise Soskolne tap into this quandary by visualizing moments of discontent and unease, abstracting form and narrative. Though unsettling, the works are also strangely enjoyable, prompting a kind of cognitive dissonance in the viewer.
Bettina Blohm and Don Voisine: Affect as subject
Contributed by Adam Simon / Two galleries with a focus on abstract painting, a short walk from each other in downtown Manhattan, currently have exhibitions that share a vocabulary of basic geometric forms, directional brushwork, and an emphasis on color relationships. Both shows present the rectangle as a primary condition of most painting and the dynamic interplay of forms within the rectangle as a drama unfolding. Yet these two shows couldn’t be more different. Seeing one after the other, as I did, was a study of how affect itself, manifested through color choices and paint application, becomes a subject for abstract painting, analogous to but different from a subject for representational painting.

































