An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, March 27, 2026
shifting formal narrative devices, and push paint in a variety of combinations in vast and surprising ways. Such a painter is Charles Yuen, whom I somehow discovered online during the pandemic. The mycelia network of interweb algorithms finally delivered a plump mushroom. “Between Here and Now” is Yuen’s second solo show with Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY.
Contributed by Abshalom Jac Lahav / Kris Rac wears many hats. They are an artist, a medievalist pursuing a Ph.D. in art history, and a partner at Field Projects Gallery. Their work is political, poetic, and visceral, and these qualities are displayed in Rac’s recent show at Home Gallery on the Lower East Side.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / I first came to know the work of Frank Owen over two decades ago through the sculptor Joel Perlman. I stepped off the elevator at Perlman’s studio on West Broadway and immediately encountered an Owen painting. It seemed fitting to discover such a physical painter as Owen through a sculptor. Only recently I learned that the title of that painting was Augmented Position, also fitting insofar as Owen has challenged and changed the way one can experience painting. The proof is in his current show “Retrospection,” on view at Nancy Hoffman Gallery.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / As though having carefully observed the painter paint them, Israeli painter Yedidya Hershberg’s figures, on view at Sugarlift, appear to now scrutinize the viewer.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / I first saw GJ Kimsunken’s work in person last fall in an exhibition at Yi Gallery titled “Where We Meet Ourselves.” Sensibly pairing his paintings with Debra Ramsay’s, the two-person exhibition mainly investigated light and materiality. With his solo exhibition “Figuration,” the gallery, which is in the emerging art corridor of Industry City in South Brooklyn, has mounted another striking and sensitive show, making optimal use of its studio-sized space. Kimsunken has largely maintained his method and approach while illuminating the substantive inflection and character of his work.
Contributed by Mary Shah / Jamie Allen and I initially met as colleagues at Alexandre Gallery last fall, and we quickly became fans of each other’s paintings. We sat down recently to discuss her residency at New York Studio School (NYSS) DUMBO Studio that began in August 2021 and is culminating with a solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper at the residency program’s gallery.
Contributed by Adam Simon / Lately I find myself wondering what impact the ubiquity of cellphone cameras is having on the practice of fine-art photography. As frustrating as it might be for the serious photographer to see everyone and their cousin constantly taking and posting pictures, one salient effect could be a rising inclination to explore the limits of what defines a photograph. There has been a resurgence of interest in photograms and camera obscura for some time now, and Joy Episalla’s current show of works labelled ‘foldtograms’ on view at Tibor de Nagy are even further removed from the idea of capturing an image.
Contributed by Zach Seeger / Nora Griffin’s ostensibly playful, jangled paintings, on display at Fierman West, reflect not only a galvanizing appreciation of the moment but also a deep understanding of art history and its connection to the contemporary zeitgeist. There is a sheer, crude brilliance about them, and it is inspiring.
Contributed by Saul Ostrow / Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has subtly set aside received truths about abstract painting, engaging it as a philosophical subject consisting of things which, regardless of differences of form and content, have been assigned the same classification.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / In “Plus,”Geoffrey Chadsey’s inventively grotesque show of drawings at Jack Shainman Gallery, the men are endlessly customizable, like sets of Mr. Potato Heads, but with dad bods instead of plastic blobs.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In his beguiling new show of abstract paintings, drawings, and collages at Frosch & Co., Robert Yoder elegantly demonstrates a truth of late modern art: that an object found and isolated, or visual representation shorn of context, is no more derivative or inferior than a given moment in time is subordinate to one that preceded or followed it. What makes it original is the artist’s unique choices in presenting it to the world – and, by implication, the singular experiences and insights that informed them.
Contributed by Patrick Neal / Full of bright and brimming lines and shapes, jumbled with quirky geometric forms and zippy colors, Gary Petersen’s paintings are giddy and uplifting. They bring to mind all manner of fun – vacation, travel, cartoons, toys, television, Creamsicles, candies, fruit slices and braided rag rugs, the flamboyant bills of toucans and pelicans. More deeply, his large abstract paintings exude a retro, utopian vibe that marries the hard-edge abstraction of late modernism with some of the quirkier strains of twentieth-century design.
Contributed by Jackson O’Brasky / In her solo exhibition “Convention” at Bureau on the Lower East Side, Kate Spencer Stewart has rendered dialogues of the long, dark night of the soul into paint.
Contributed by Margaret McCann / In Sasha Gordon’s “The Hands of Others” at Jeffrey Deitch and Maud Madsen’s “Daisy Chain” at Marianne Boesky, fleshy females are pressed on the picture planes as if between corporeality and social stress. All are self-portraits, but the figures read more as types performing hidden allegories.
Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / Titled “PLEASE IT IS MAKING THEM THANKS:),” Louis Osmosis’s debut solo show at Kapp Kapp Gallery in Tribeca feels like a 1,000-piece puzzle that’s been dumped on a table. Everything fits together, but it’s not immediately clear how.
Amelie Mancini: Longing and wonder
St. Francis at the Frick
Tracy Burtz and Claire McConaughy: Vulnerability and resilience at The Painting Center
Kathy Butterly’s small-scale magnitude
Ezra Johnson and Matt Bollinger: Disrupting convention
Six artists meshing at Field Projects
“Sonorous” in Hackney: Stairway to heaven?
Doomscrolling 3-D + IRL: The 2026 Whitney Biennial
2025’s intrepid cinema
Sally Gall: What am I looking at?
Mira Schor: Uncensored
Two Coats Resident Artist: Nichole van Beek, March 16–20
