Award-winning NYC blogazine with a focus on painting
Tuesday, July 28, 2026
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…
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.
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 […]
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
Contributed by Ben Godward / Meg Lipke and Jeff Williams seem to dance through the fledgling Roundabouts Now Gallery – once a medical office conference room in an industrial park – in Kingston, New York. The central collaboration comprises a large sewn and stuffed canvas with ruin-like drawings enveloping three deliciously odd sculptural objects. This union casts a pervasive spell. Pushing the interior accretion forms further into the unreal are surfaces that appear to be made of dust or remnants of ashes. Spectral in their essence but protected in the upholstered pool, they look as if they could dissolve into a pile if touched.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / “A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson in another context. As much as I respect institutional Minimalism, economy in painting excites me more, and what could be more economical than a three-person, three-painting exhibition presented in a 135-square-foot space with one empty wall? Artist Mark Sengbusch has scrupulously curated “3 Painters” at Field of Play in Gowanus in accord with his own personal Periodic Table, in which each artist represents a specific Element. Charlotte Hallberg is field, Clare Grill is air, and Victoria Roth is depth.
Contributed by Almog Cohen-Kashi / A rose has never had a fixed meaning. This simple flower swings between adoration and destruction, purity and rot, natural beauty and artificial symbolism. Seamlessly interlacing art history and literature, “A Rose Is” at the FLAG Art Foundation brings together 39 artists of varying generations and backgrounds for a poetic exploration of how society views an idealized plant to project shifting attitudes towards love, romance, commercialism, commemoration, and decay in an elegantly curated exhibition….
Contributed by Michael Brennan / I have long admired the work of the three artists Michelle Segre and Guy Corriero, whose work is now on display at “Fly like a Flea, Sink like a Stone” at Springs Projects, as well as Claire Seidl, whose show “Days Like These” is up at Helm Contemporary.
Contributed by Will Maddoxx / On Valentine’s Day, I walked into Living Skin, a “project space and persons hub” in Bushwick that had piqued my interest when I read its manifesto and perused promotional images for the group show “Hyper-meme.” I came to the show with some hesitation, as I have been to countless group shows that seemed unfocused and vague. Smatterings of “work about histories of images” or “art of a contemporary landscape” have gotten old and deflating. “Hyper-meme,” however, is sharp, original, and hyper-specific. It blew me away.
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Lassoing whimsy and venturing into uncanny realms where crimson eyes peer from stones, “Fairyland 2: Deeper, Darker” at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, curated by Valerie Hegarty, presents a captivating visual language of non-human elementals and imaginings. Fairies, as an archetype, are perennially underestimated. Nimble and powerful in their capacity to provoke enchantment, they idiosyncratically neutralize assumptions through glamour, illusion, and surprise, and collapse boundaries of knowing and unknowing, and visibility and invisibility. In this group show, various paintings portray animals – one has bats emerging from petrified stage curtains in the forest – but figuration dominates. Bodies on the ground or bending towards the earth suggest unknown struggles, pixie-led crossings, enchanted tasks, and tales of wonder. Hybrid creatures, including Mala Iqbal’s painting Forest Tangle with Jaybird, align with Leonora Carrington’s surreal chimerical figures, including Figuras Miticas: Bailarin II and Girl, Horse, Tree, now on view in “Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver” at the Rose Art Museum.
Contributed by Riad Miah / In conjunction with their two-person exhibition, The Shape of Things, at the John Molloy Gallery, I had the opportunity to engage in a conversation with artists Drew Shiflett and Carter Hodgkin about their materials and unusual creative processes. At first, their pairing seemed unexpected, as their visual languages appeared quite distinct. However, after seeing the exhibition firsthand, I came to appreciate the deep connections and underlying commonalities in their work.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There are a fair few viable organizing concepts for group art exhibitions. One particularly challenging one is to present viewers with a tour d’horizon of emotions and attitudes that seem to prevail at a given historical moment. The key to optimal execution, of course, is to avoid both the obvious and the obscure. In “Each Own” at Springs Projects, curators and gallery co-founders Cate Holt and Tommy White strike the right balance, strategically deploying the work of six exceptional…
Contributed by Katy Crowe / Michael Handley and Greg Lindquist’s show at the Landing Gallery – identified by the emoji for fire – could not have been more poignantly timed. It coincides with California’s fire season and more particularly the destructive Mountain Fire just north of Los Angeles, beyond that with drought-induced fires on the east coast, including Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and with an incendiary presidential election.
Contributed by Adam Simon / There have been group shows that represented cultural milestones – the Armory Show of 1913, the “‘Bad’ Painting” show at the New Museum in 1978, the Times Square Show of 1980. In the shadow of a foreboding US presidential election, “Pierogi 30” has that kind of historical weight.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / It would be hard to miss the overarching theme of Lydia Baker’s show “Sonnet,” up at Massey Klein Gallery: metamorphosis. But rather than relying on overused signifiers, she gently guides us through life’s whitewater rapids, her work practically whispering “the only constant is change.”
