Solo Shows

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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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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