An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, April 24, 2026
Contributed by Peter Malone / “Long story short” could describe many an art review, but here it is also the name of one of a growing number of pocket galleries along the section of Henry Street beneath the Manhattan Bridge. Long Story Short NYC recently hosted an exhibition of a dozen of Siobhan McBride’s small but compelling paintings, titled “Always Means Never Not” and curated by Stavroula Coulianidis.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There’s a Seinfeld episode in which Elaine, annoyed by the knowing ellipticality of a New Yorker cartoon caption, marches into the august magazine’s offices and confronts the editor – portrayed to preppy-geek perfection by the late Edward Herrmann – about its meaning. After offering several generic, pretentious, and abjectly unconvincing interpretations, he admits that he has no idea what the hell the caption is supposed to mean. Jeff Gabel – whose elaborately narrated drawings and paintings, a few site-specific, are presently on display in a solo at Spencer Brownstone Gallery on the Lower East Side and a group show at Jennifer Baahng Gallery on the Upper East Side – runs no such risk, abjuring obscure glibness for mordantly wise, sourly penetrating bloviation.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Rob de Oude’s exquisitely painted geometric abstractions, on display at McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side, at once resist and invite scrutiny. Though wholly handmade, they are all composed of small squares that appear so perfect, calmingly symmetrical, and plain beautiful as to discourage a closer look: there’s nothing more to see here, and what you see is fine enough. But his patterns – both over the expanse of the canvas and within each rectangle – are so intricate and their variations so subtle that a hard look turns out to be compulsory and in fact rewarding.
Contributed by David Carrier / Spencer Finch’s new and recent work at Hill Art Foundation in Chelsea are set in dialogue with The Creation and the Expulsion from Paradise, a magnificent 1533 stained-glass window by Renaissance master Valentin Bousch. “Lux and Lumen,” the exhibition’s title, comes from Abbot Suger of the cathedral at Saint-Denis, who praised the power of stained glass to transform natural light, or lux, into sacred light, or lumen. Inspired by that medieval idea, and by his visit to Claude Monet’s pond and garden at Giverny, Finch’s Painting Air, an immersive hanging-glass installation, is a dramatic visual essay on light.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / On one level, in “Flex, Rot, and Sp(l)it,” a penetrating and conceptually cohesive show of paintings at Nathalie Karg Gallery, Heidi Hahn visually chronicles the tension between the unavoidable confinement of the body and the irrepressible expansiveness of the mind. While the so-called mind-body problem is as old as philosophy itself, to Western audiences it is perhaps most resonant in René Descartes’ exercise of systematic doubt, concluding with “I think therefore I am.” In terms of value, this ingrained formulation privileges the mind over the body. While philosophers are left to connect mental processes with gray matter, for painters and others it can be discomfiting to realize that although thinking is supposed to be the essence of being, a person’s mind is often prejudged on the basis of their body’s characteristics.
Contributed by Julia Bland / The eleven canvases in Firelei Báez’s current exhibition “Americananana” at James Cohan Gallery continue her decades-long practice of painting directly on found maps and printed materials. By activating the surface with historical references, Báez calls into focus the dual nature of the painted gesture as both action and erasure. While considering what relevant details have now vanished behind an outstretched arm or pale yellow swath, one might also wonder whether any canvas is ever truly blank.
Contributed by Riad Miah / Athens, Georgia-based painter Ridley Howard’s new body of work, now on display at his third solo show at Marinaro, continues to explore relationships between figuration and abstraction with a refined pop sensibility, easing effortlessly between small and larger formats. The gallery’s abundant new space on Broadway is ideal, allowing viewers to absorb shifts in scale and reflect on contrasting elements, which Howard now seems to have fully resolved and mastered.
Contributed by James J.A. Mercer / The main works in “Inside Out, Outside In,” Dylan Vandenhoeck’s bravura solo show at Jack Barrett gallery, are large, vertically oriented oil paintings, approximately human scale. Two are on interlocking irregular canvases, and there are three smaller horizontal pieces. Some are on unusual fabrics, or contain objects such as candy wrappers and string that could be related to the scenes painted on them. Big gestural swirls and streaks of color frame plein air landscapes and interiors. Certain zones are masterfully illusionistic, such as the wintry parking lot through dirty glass in Of the Corner. Other areas are daringly loose, collapsing into stray marks and spectral debris.
Contributed by Marjorie Welish / A Berlin-based Japanese artist well-established abroad, Leiko Ikemura is now having her first exhibition in the United States at Fergus McCaffrey in Chelsea. The show presents a range of her works to fine effect, including masks, figurines in terracotta, and others in cast glass. Her drawing and painting are of particular note. Ikemura pulls together antithetical forces to keep the drawing painterly, and the painting grounded in gestural drawing.
Contributed by Adam Simon / Don Dudley’s minimalism has always had a West Coast flavor, more concerned with perception than objecthood. Like many artists of his generation, he has steered clear of expressionism, or anything that shifted attention from the object to the artist. His focus has been on the purely visual.
Contributed by Riad Miah / The eleven oil paintings in Fran O’Neill’s solo show “Left Turn” at Equity Gallery traffic in vivid, vibrant gestures of color that form softly curved, ribbon-like shapes. While they bring to mind artists like James Nares, Karin Davie, and David Reed, O’Neill’s energetic but self-consciously controlled brushstrokes and honed sense of color and light more directly suggest instants of becoming or emergence. Reaching back so full-bloodedly to revisit gestural painting, and to exploit the expressive potential of abstraction and the flexibility of its formal attributes, somehow seems heroic.
Contributed by Mark Wethli / Years ago I was fascinated to read about a theory that the grooves on ancient clay pots, like the grooves on a vintage music cylinder, might be playable. Given the right audio equipment, we might be able to hear the voices and sounds of the potter’s studio the moment the pot was being made. This beguiling notion came to mind while I was looking at the most recent work of Tom Butler at the Sarah Bouchard Gallery in Woolwich, Maine.
Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / The motif of time is deeply and deftly embedded in Christopher Knowles’s solo exhibition, STAND, at The Watermill Center…In his contemplation of time, Knowles provides a portal to pop culture from days of yore, with associations to language and sound.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Dream Opera,” Mary Shah’s solo show at Rick Wester Fine Art in Chelsea, presents suavely dense abstract narratives that still unfailingly meet the visual priority of beauty. While the notion of an abstract narrative may seem paradoxical by its terms, if representation and abstraction are part of a continuum and not a stark dichotomy, the paradox isn’t too daunting to resolve. Abstract Expressionism, spiritual abstraction, and lyrical abstraction have long certified emotional and spiritual content in abstract painting, and opened the door to narrative as well. Shah confidently marches through it, and in fine style.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / Issy Wood’s paintings in “Time Sensitive” at Michael Werner gallery render transient facets of our daily simulacrum timeless. As though passed through a vintage filter, they seem to recall a. Claude glass, an 18th c pocket-sized, toned mirror that could turn any scrappy piece of wilderness into “a vision of painterly charm: framed and set apart from the rest of the landscape, color palette simplified, bathed in gentle, hazy light.” Aided by a new picturesque aesthetic that combined “the sweetness of the beautiful, cut with some of the sublime’s majestic terror,” ramblers who couldn’t afford the Grand Tour found beauty in local scenery with this handy device. Today one need not even venture outdoors to see anything new. Overstimulation awaits on a quick screen scroll, shifting from monuments to corrective braces to kittens to a Ukrainian battlefield in seconds. Woods slows this high-low flow, turning incongruous images fished from the cyber-stream into often amusing visual meditations with surprising emotional depth.
Eric Wolf: Into the fog
Folk Art’s faux-ish innocence
Two Coats Resident Artist Gyan Shrosbree, May 5 – 10
E.M. Saniga: Country life vigorously observed
Paul Klee, degenerate for the ages
Ken D. Resseger: Closer to creation
Ruby Palmer: Flowers are forever
Sam Jablon’s delicious confusion
Miró’s far-reaching tutelage
Elisa Jensen’s expansive interiors 
Stuart Fineman and Alan Greenberg: Meaningfully minimal
Grandma Moses’s simple world
