Solo Shows

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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Solo Shows

Anke Weyer: Flying free

Contributed by Rick Briggs / If I’m being completely honest, for years I never completely got the work of Anke Weyer. Sure, she’s always had all the right moves – bold color, loose paint handling, and a juicy surface, all of which gave her work directness, spontaneity, and immediacy – but something felt off. The color was mostly discordant, and the gesture appeared merely aggressive, with an attitude that seemed anarchistic, almost like a form of punk nihilism. My perception began to change with “Nocturnes,” Weyer’s 2024 show at CANADA. I noticed the paintings began to slow down with masses of organic color shapes in works like Lucky, Sleepless and Monster.

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Solo Shows

Emily Kraus: Balancing control and surrender

Contributed by Tena Saw / Emily Kraus’s paintings are stuttering fields of glitches and agitation that shake and swagger like a Warhol Elvis. Her debut New York solo exhibition at Luhring Augustine Tribeca arrives with a kind of procedural mythology already attached. The artist works inside a self-designed apparatus, feeding raw canvas through rollers, painting in collaboration with the machine. The paintings come into being from pressure, friction, and chance.

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Solo Shows

Kari Cholnoky: Stalking dullness

Contributed by Matthew Logsdon / Upon entering “Leech,” Kari Cholnoky’s third solo exhibition at Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, one of the first sculptures encountered is Conservation of Mass, a cranial-like form of smooth, peach-colored alabaster atop a steel pedestal. It is vertically symmetrical, with the most protruding elements centered like noses, creating a ribbed topography of ridges and recesses that suggest a face. The casual viewer is afforded just enough space between the sculpture and the wall to peek around the back of the piece but not enough to see it from eye level. An especially bold and engaged visitor, though, would find a wisdom tooth resting within a fleshy cavity. Is this the physical record of bodily alteration? Part of a strategy of removing superfluous body parts? Conservation of Mass embodies mortal life: confrontation, cat and mouse, meat and bone. There’s acknowledgment that sometimes something needs to be cut out to salvage the whole.

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Solo Shows

Eric Wolf: Into the fog

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Few artists – even among those dedicated to the landscape – would look at a body of water and think, “OK, I’m going to spend the next 30 years painting this.” Yet, year by year, Eric Wolf has done just that, driven by a fascination with the daily transformation of water’s surface, its complementary relationship to air, its connection with people, and the peculiarly seductive power of black ink on paper. “Two Waters,” on view at Abri Mars, spans three decades of Wolf’s en plein air ink painting, which he did exclusively at two sites: a pond in Chatham, New York, and a lake in Rangeley, Maine.

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Solo Shows

E.M. Saniga: Country life vigorously observed

Contributed by Sutton Allen / With his show at Donald Ryan Gallery, E.M. Saniga join the esteemed company of artists who have eschewed fashion for the sake of personal vision. His real kin are Albert Pinkham Ryder and Courbet. He and Courbet are both interested in the raw beauty of country life yet also share an urbane sensibility. Saniga’s experience is made tactile through carefully modeled half tones and a calculated and surprising facture.

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Solo Shows

Ken D. Resseger: Closer to creation

Contributed by Michael Brennan / In blues, there’s a tradition of over-practice, the idea being that the same song played thousands of times, and thus mastered, might yield something new about its nature, revealing a hidden room. My own artistic bias has long been to err on the side of underdevelopment. Ken Resseger, who was a student of mine over 25 years ago, back then overpainted. But, while his work could be labored, it often opened an entirely new world. As an older, seasoned painter, he has become something of a visionary in the very American vein of Martin Johnson Heade – a naturalist who painted exotic, realistic, yet unnatural landscapes.

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Solo Shows

Ruby Palmer: Flowers are forever

Contributed by Peter Schroth / Some subjects are immune to age or aesthetic trends. Like the sprout that powers through the crack in the sidewalk, plant life in general and flowers in particular are irrepressible inspirations for art and have breached the territories of artists primarily known for other, more rigorous forms, from Piet Mondrian to Amy Sillman. Ruby Palmer’s show “Garden Theory” at Morgan Lehman Gallery demonstrates yet again that flowers are forever.

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Solo Shows

Sam Jablon’s delicious confusion

Contributed by William Corwin / The paintings of Sam Jablon now on view at Morgan Presents produce delicious sentient confusion. The neural circuits devoted to looking at an image get crossed with those used to read text. We find the words, but, in Jablon’s hands, we don’t know what to do with them. Fuck, for example, a little 18-inch square painting in solid yellow with blue with black lettering, seems less about sex and more about the frustrated expletive. Or perhaps it’s a cold command, broken down into two letters on top, F and U, and two letters below, C and K. We also fix…

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Solo Shows

Opal Mae Ong: Worlds weighing in

Contributed by Lucas Moran / “Always Were” is the title of Opal Mae Ong’s solo show at Plato Gallery. It’s a compact declaration – two words that look both forward and back. The work does the same. Old ways, rituals, medicines, and inherited knowledge blur into future or parallel worlds: gradient skies without brushstrokes, glowing plants, and figures who bathe, offer, watch, and mourn. Grief is a constant presence here – not as melodrama but as a condition with the same dignity and value as joy or love. Ong treats all of it as coexistent. Nothing replaces anything.

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Solo Shows

Barbara Takenaga’s pinballing fantasia

Contributed by Peter Schroth / Barbara Takenaga’s current exhibition at DC Moore, “Parallax,” picks up from her 2024 exhibit “Whatsis” and continues an arc roughly twenty years in the making. The works are acrylic on canvas and panel and range from diminutive rectangles to monumental multi-paneled pieces.Takenaga iterates her signature techniques of pouring and handwork seamlessly, in a lead-and-follow approach that balances randomness, intuition, and calculation.

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Solo Shows

Lois Dodd: A balm against cynicism

Contributed by David Whelan / I first saw a Lois Dodd painting in 2004. View through Elliot’s Shack Looking South was part of a group show at our college gallery when I was a freshman. The painting absolutely stunned me and served as a touchstone throughout my education and early adulthood. Dodd’s solo show “A Radiant Simplicity” at The Art Gallery at Brooklyn College might have done the same for others.

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Solo Shows

Amelie Mancini: Longing and wonder

Contributed by Caroline Otis Heffron / Amelie Mancini’s debut solo exhibition at Massey Klein Gallery, offers poignant reflections on women, enticing viewers with harmonious colors and intricate patterns that initially convey a sense of contentment and balance. But her layering techniques, involving translucent paint, and repeating motifs – reminiscent of  Vuillard, Matisse, and Modersohn-Becker – encourage closer study of gesture and expression. As the viewer moves in, archetypal faces emerge with expressions of longing and wonder, leaving ambivalence. 

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Gallery shows Solo Shows

Mira Schor: Uncensored

Contributed by Jonah James Romm / How does one acquire language? How do words shape identity and meaning? These questions might strike you upon entering Mira Schor’s exhibition “Figures of Speech” at Lyles & King. Bringing together a previously unseen body of the artist’s work from the 1980s and paintings from the last two years, the exhibition traces the compelling self-referential progression of Schor’s work over the last four decades. 

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Solo Shows

Kate Hargrave: Unsettling and generous

Contributed by Lore Heller / “MILK TEETH,” the title of Kate Hargrave’s show at Karma, implies both permanent loss and permanent gain. One gains milk teeth as a baby and loses them as adult teeth take their place. If children place them under their pillows, fairies might bring rewards. Losing milk teeth is losing childhood, developing permanent teeth coming of age – reminders to parents that time inexorably arcs life. Joni Mitchell observed that “we’re captive on the carousel of time,” and my grandmother’s lullaby, “toyland, toyland, beautiful boy and girl land,” reminds us that “once you cross its borders you may never return again.” Hargrave, who painted this work as she raised two children, captures this pervasively bittersweet quality.

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