Solo Shows

Conversation Solo Shows

Nancy Bowen: Language, the female body, traditional craft, and history

In connection with “Nancy Bowen: From A to Z and the Bodies In Between,” her solo exhibition at NUNU Fine Art, Two Coats of Paint arranged a conversation between Bowen and psychoanalyst-artist Laurence Hegarty about her practice. Approaching her work with an “artist-archaeologist” mindset, Bowen finds materials reassembles them into objects that challenge established narratives about language, the female body, traditional craft, and history. She indulges playfulness and unconscious impulses, letting social and political themes emerge in due course.

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Solo Shows Upstate Art Weekend

David Fix, Jr.’s existential retrenchment

Contributed by Bill Arning / Comments at openings such as, “I just can’t look at another painting by a hot young artist showing off a dreamy life in Fire Island Pines” are all too familiar – “hot” referring to both the bronzed, gym-sculpted bodies on display and the artists’ meteoric careers. The field has become crowded enough that it now seems nearly impossible for a young gay painter, even one emerging from a prestigious MFA program, to develop a genuinely distinctive visual language. That is why David Fix, Jr.’s first solo exhibition, “The Cusp of Magic” at The Fireplace Project, is such a welcome surprise.

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Solo Shows Upstate Art Weekend

Peter Acheson: The edge of composure

Contributed by David Whelan / Peter Acheson’s paintings and sculptures live on the edge of composure through seemingly dashed-off operations, loose frameworks, and blurred boundaries. By making artwork with such a loose grip on solidity, Acheson invites us to step away from the known towards an enchanting oblivion. The title “Fifty Miles” comes from poet Gary Snyder’s response to the question of how famous he wanted to be: “Fifty miles seems about right”. Fifty miles is a human scale – not the span of global art fairs or finance but that of friendship, shared resources, and habitat. It is also roughly the distance between the gallery and the artist’s studio, which put a smile on my face. The show is curated by Teffia Primary and hosted at Maiden Lane Gallery, an old two-story building full of oddball characteristics. The space is connected to the local YWCA, whose preschool playground can be seen from the second-floor window, reminding us we are in a space of growth and play.

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Solo Shows

Molly Rose Lieberman’s resonant work

Contributed by Leslie Roberts / During a recent tour of downtown galleries, I saw several consecutive shows presenting tightly programmed bodies of work. In exhibit after exhibit, the pieces were uniform in size, homogeneous in strategy, and made of standardized, highly finished components. Even some strong exhibits felt overly glossy, suffused with a commodified quality. Molly Rose Lieberman’s “The Candles Are on the Table,” at Theta Gallery, was a welcome relief. Each painting and sculpture has a particular format and resolution that the artist appears to have arrived at in the making.

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Solo Shows

Kenneth Noland: Generative force and visual dynamism

Contributed by Alex Grimley / In the 1972 documentary Painters Painting, Kenneth Noland is asked by director Emile de Antonio, “What does ‘color field painting’ mean?” The plainspoken artist thinks for a second before answering, “What they generally mean, I think, is that the painting is mostly generated by color, rather than, say, drawing or any other means.” Noland’s matter-of-fact response is indicative of his feeling about such terminology. Labels coined in the 1960s like “color field painting” and “post-painterly abstraction” – “a fairly awkward term,” he remarked – circumscribed his art, categorizing it alongside that of painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski, artists whose aims increasingly diverged from Noland’s. “Kenneth Noland: From Center to Edge,” currently on view at Hunter Dunbar Projects, is a concentrated presentation that illustrates the considerable range of the artist’s practice over four decades, from the 1960s to the early 2000s. 

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Solo Shows

Angelo Vasta: Comfort in darkness 

Contributed by Alessandrio Teoldi / Angelo Vasta’s exhibition “Luci Spente” (Lights Off) at Tappeto Volante in Tribeca centers on a simple gesture: turning down the light. Not removing it, not rejecting color, but softening its intensity. For an artist whose visual language has often featured bright, vibrant palettes, this is a bold shift of deliberate subtraction.

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Solo Shows

Amorelle Jacox’s spiritual science

Contributed by William Corwin / Depictions of spirits and monsters are often combinations of the diagrammatic and the visceral: attributes packaged in an erotic or terrifying container. Amorelle Jacox’s luminous female presences in “Mothers of Time,” now on view at Management, are unassuming and recessive beings peering out between throbbing bands of color and eerie cones of light. She populates her large-scale canvases with measurement devices – rulers, color wheels, and sundry visual and geometric rubrics that guide the viewer’s interpretation of the powers invested in each of the goddesses or muses she has invented. 

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Solo Shows

David Humphrey: The hiker

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / David Humphrey has accustomed his audience to acerbically penetrating representational paintings in which witty riffs resolve into considered pronouncements about the world. His 2022 painting Art Shipping – depicting a van about to bring a painting of a misogynistic act of torture from the artist’s serenely rustic home to a presumptively hermetic white-cube gallery – is a fine example of his unsparing fusion of introspection and worldly scrutiny. Whereas such trenchant paintings – and there are many – reflect Humphrey’s fully crystallized ideas, the work in “anecdote,” his current show mainly of drawings at Kate Werble Gallery, captures a number of them in intermediate stages, offering graphic insight into his thought processes. 

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Solo Shows

David Gilbert’s fugitive miracles

Contributed by Bill Arning / With the photographs of Los Angeles–based artist David Gilbert, whose show “Stationary” is now up at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, one repeatedly asks: where exactly is the art occurring? He has found a way to destabilize the exact moment when ordinary objects shift into Fine Art with a capital A. At first glance, these works can appear almost incidental – serene accounts of light falling across a studio wall, with scraps of paper, drawings, and pinned objects casually arranged. They masquerade as found images, random moments merely “noticed” by a wandering photographer with a point-and-shoot camera. The spaces are shallow and flat; the compositions initially seem haphazard.

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Solo Shows

Jessica Frances Grégoire Lancaster: Loss and memory

Contributed by Romy Marcus Cohen / Photographs offer a false promise of perfect preservation. In her new show “Don’t Be a Stranger” at Trotter&Sholer, Jessica Frances Grégoire Lancaster grapples with the loss of a close friend through her continued exploration of the instability of images and the memories they hold. Working from a personal archive of vernacular photography, Lancaster turns snapshots into back-painted oil paintings on glass, drawing emotional intensity from the tension between recognition and anonymity, intimacy and distance, presence and absence. 

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Solo Shows

Emma Webster: Peculiar but pleasant

Contributed by Will Maddoxx / Last summer, the New York Times  reported that someone impersonated Lady Gaga to buy a painting of Emma Webster’s. The piece highlighted the market for these paintings and coincided with an impressive show at Petzel displaying two huge canvases at once grand and sublime. Seeing that “Rues and Leaves Themselves Alone” was opening so soon after that last show, I wondered whether the work would be rushed and uninventive. In fact, the new paintings are very good.

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Solo Shows

Daniel Wiener’s soft machines

Contributed by Laurence Hegarty / Daniel Wiener’s naming system for his own work is quite precise. On his website, he states of the piece titled Clutching: “Genre: Sculpture | Like: Bowl | Placed: On A Shelf. ” Most would recognize that it is, well, a sculpture like a bowl, wherever it is placed. Wiener’s work dallies on a threshold between aesthetic bliss and mundane function. Into his semi functional world Wiener has smuggled images of faces: toothy grins, mouths agape, and wide-awake eyes returning the viewer’s gaze. In his current show at Satchel Projects, “Out in Front of the Back of Beyond,” the faces have migrated and are now sculptural objects. The viewer is placed in a direct encounter with a face. For Wiener, this shift is vital and intentional, as “the space of intimacy” – “two beings face-to-face in close proximity” – is the subject of his work. 

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Solo Shows

Mark Webber: Trees lounge

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In Mark Webber’s conceptual world, on display at Anita Rogers Gallery, trees gently but surely infiltrate the architecture humans have contrived in their space. They embrace it, disorient it, crack wise about it, and generally take manmade structures down a peg, reminding them – us – that they were here first and have survived the longest. Here there are at least remote echoes of Malcolm Peacock’s massive sculpture of a redwood at the Whitney Biennial and louder ones of Giuseppe Penone’s Arte Povera tree-based sculptures unifying art and nature.

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Solo Shows

Hilda Shen: Objects containing multitudes

Contributed by Michael Brennan / Years ago, I took an art history class in Chinese landscape painting. It was broadening but almost farcically daunting, attempting to cover the art of 13 major Chinese dynasties in just 15 weeks. Nevertheless, it got me started. Asian art has long been a de facto independent study project for me. Most of the Chinese art that has attracted me was made not by celebrated official court painters but rather by former politicians who became poets in exile or, often, scholar monks. The latter reminded me of Herman Melville’s “isolatoes” – artists who rejected the “common continent of men,” living instead on “separate continents of their own.” Hilda Shen, whose solo sculpture show “Beyond This” is now up at Starr Suites, possesses the sensibilities of both her Chinese forebears and the isolatoes of the American Renaissance, who overlap by way of the Asian and Emersonian philosophies of nature. 

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Solo Shows

April Gornik’s unsettled landscapes

Contributed by Rebecca Allan / In “Liminal States,” Miles McEnery Gallery presented recent paintings by April Gornik, juxtaposing five of her familiar large-scaled canvases with seven much smaller paintings, depicting fragments of landscape against vast, roiling skies. Her unsettling work is based upon her observations of nature and the cosmos. Its mystery comes not from the replication of superficial appearances but rather from the fusion of precise draftsmanship and painterly rendering, which involves complex modulations in brushwork, texture, and chromatic layering.

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Conversation Solo Shows

At the gallery with Olivia Drusin 

Contributed by David Humphrey / The gallery in question is Alyssa Davis Gallery, which featured Olivia Drusin’s solo show “DUMMY” from March 7 to April 19, 2026. / David Humphrey: I’m going to improvise some questions, and we’re going to go around and talk about your paintings. One of my favorite things is to look at a painting and have a conversation with it. But of course you are with me, which makes it more complicated. One of the things that interests me about painting generally is its tactile character, that the whole work was made at arm’s reach by touching the canvas over and over. You make that into a theme. If you paint a doorknob, as in Foggy Interpose, even if it’s disorientingly larger than life, it establishes a connection between looking and touching. Or the little intercom phone with buttons inside the vestibule that needs to be picked up and poked to get into the building. But a new dimension of your work in this show that’s harder to put our hands on is the atmosphere. The purple haze is a kind of affect-saturated air that is almost breathable. If touch is one form of contact, breath and taking in air is another form of intimacy. So that’s my hello to this painting.

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Solo Shows

Louisa Chase: Painting psychic risk

At Berry Campbell Gallery, “Louisa Chase: The Eighties” is less a rediscovery than an emphatic reassertion of a leading painter who resisted easy categorization within the shifting narratives of the Neo-Expressionist and New Image movements in New York. Featured in this, the largest exhibition of the artist’s work in New York City in over 25 years, are works that span the decade between mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, Chase, who died in 2016, emerges as a more complex and pivotal artist than she is usually considered. 

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Solo Shows

Katherine Umsted: Anything but seamless

Contributed by Bill Arning / Sometimes the architecture of an exhibition space draws out qualities in an artist’s work that might remain latent elsewhere. Katherine Umsted is a familiar presence in the Hudson Valley art scene, known for an overflowing aesthetic of massive, boat-like vessels on the verge of collapse, constructed from rough-and-ready materials that could evidence a 2026 reincarnation of Arte Povera. It is hard to imagine a less suitable setting for such work than…

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Solo Shows

Maureen Dougherty’s collectors: Pride without greed

Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Maureen Dougherty brings her paintings to life with quiet assurance. For “The Completionists,” her current exhibition at Mendes Wood DM in Germantown, she presents portraits of solitary collectors showcasing their collections in muted yet elegant tones not unlike Luc Tuymans’, with dabs of paint nestled into shadows and on tips of asparagus. Objects such as dog figurines, serving dishes, Picasso’s ceramics, skulls, and books are dutifully balanced on horizontal bands of shelving stretching across the picture plane, providing a fixed compositional framework. Perhaps Dougherty’s years of working in abstraction cultivated the acuity and freedom in her brushstroke. Nearly every one of the nine paintings on view fills the expanse of canvas as if to suggest that we’ve zoomed in on a larger presentation, singling out this particular person with this particular array of belongings while also understanding the moment as memory. 

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