An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, March 27, 2026
Contributed by Katy Crowe / The German noun Umwelt means environment. “ultraUMWELT,” the title of Rosy Keyser’s current solo show at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery, denotes a world of dynamically connected matter. You can read a great deal into it – earth, ecosystems, subterranean root networks, and of course decay. Her work recalls biomorphic/organic abstraction, but the serendipity her process allows gives her paintings bracing and distinctive freshness.
Contributed by Zach Seeger / Dennis Congdon, whose paintings depict acrid colored heaps of art garbage, once told me, “I tend to appreciate painters who work economically with what they’re given from their surroundings. You know, like my grandmother, who lived on a farm, and would whip up a meal with practically nothing in the fridge.” I too was raised to appreciate this beauty-through-austerity approach, and in light of tariffs and stagnating sales, painting with economy and valuing actual pigment may not just be in fashion but necessary. “The Big Seed,” Eric Hibit’s painting show at Morgan Lehman, is a tribute to physical pigment and the conservationist spirit, and a showcase for acute observational detail and the sheer joy of painting.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / At first blush, Hope Gangloff’s remarkable new paintings, on view at Susan Inglett Gallery and largely set in a notional rustic retreat, could be mistaken for blown-up greeting cards for vacationing hipsters, perhaps with a sly nod to David Hockney. Pristinely applying acrylic paint, she crafts them like illustrations, and they are unabashedly luminous. But the ecstatic vibe that characteristically radiates from that quality, though present, is winkingly deceptive. While Gangloff paints friends and actively cherishes the intimate golden moment, existential concerns burn through her work.
Contributed by Will Kaplan / Curatorial collective Immaterial Projects calls its group show at The Active Space in Bushwick “The Beginning of the End.” It might seem a bit late for the beginning. We can trace the sense of perpetual crisis as far back as we like: Trump’s first term, Citizens United, the Reagan years, and farther still. But by keeping the show’s formal scope to semi-traditional paintings, Immaterial Projects captures elements of past and present alike that still smack us in the face. The show’s colors span cement and sepia, hanging along the gallery’s opposing corners to illustrate decay in both urban and natural landscapes.
Contributed by Patrick Ryan Bell / Situated in Baltimore’s Old Goucher neighborhood, art hall has rapidly established itself as a pivotal space for contemporary art. Once a Hells Angels bar, the venue has undergone a thoughtful transformation that embraces its history and urban context by way of significant international artists tailored to Charm City’s audience. In a city shaped by economic precariousness, institutional neglect, and fierce grassroots creativity, art hall presents an alternative model: serious contemporary programming without the trappings of market pressure or institutional polish. Owner and director Shawn Mudd is not looking to feed or mimic New York but instead to divert its pipeline, bringing established artists to Baltimore. Now up is Sam Anderson’s solo exhibition, “There’s a Girl in My Soup,” which features a wide range of her work. It fits the gallery: rigorous, poetic, and strange.
Contributed by Amanda Church / Following the fleshy path of Rubens, Lucian Freud, Joan Semmel, and Cecily Brown, among many others, Camilla Fallon has recently focused her loose, lush brushwork on the female body’s midsection, specifically the navel. “The Navel Is the Center,” her current show at The Painting Center, consists of eight medium-scale paintings and four very small ones, most providing an intimate view of this inverted body part. Under such close scrutiny, it becomes symbolic, implying vulnerability, contemplation, and introspection.
Daniel Giordano: Yura, I want to play a game of me spitting out a question and you rattling off an answer. A real Martin Kippenberger special of a “first thought, best thought” type response to keep us on our toes… Okay, so here we go: What artists do you steal from most and what bag of tricks did you whip out to aid in the making of your installation at Olympia?
Contributed by David Carrier / Thanks to remarkably cultivated parents, Lisbon-born Maria Helena Vieira da Silva (1908–1992) was exposed to a lot of important art from early on. When she was just five, she saw the work of Paolo Uccello, a clear influence, in London’s National Gallery. Moving to France in 1928, Vieiro da Silva showed in Paris in the late 1920s and 1930s, took refuge from the German occupation during World War II in Brazil (her husband, Arpad Szenes, was a Hungarian Jew), and after the war returned to Paris, where she had a successful career. The expertly installed exhibition currently at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice aims to bring her art to the attention of contemporary audiences.
Contributed by Lucas Moran / In art, limitations often define, shape, and mold strengths. We can embrace drawbacks and spin them into gold. An impoverished de Kooning, living off ketchup packets and free coffee, turned to house paint to create some of his most compelling work. A bedridden Matisse cut paper. Scarcity, oppression, impairment – these forces have shaped the course of art history. Rather than relying on convention, Jan Dickey – investigator, tinkerer, and forager as well as painter – has immersed himself in studying how things break down, bond, and hold together. “The High Collapse,” now on view at 5-50 Gallery, is the culmination of that endeavor….
Contributed by R. Blake Miller / Benjamin Klein’s solo exhibition “Sentinels and Satellites” at Tappeto Volante Gallery is at once enchanting and unnerving, like the fresh memory of a dream seen vividly even as it slips away. With an unapologetically saturated palette, the Brooklyn-based artist lays down paint in both translucent coats of tinted light and thick pools, blending natural textures with sublime color-mixing techniques. A surreal story involving animals and their plant counterparts unfolds. What initially feels inviting and innocent becomes tinted by dread. Mythic symbols hover beyond easy reading, coaxing viewers to explore their relationships with art more deeply.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / This month, the Two Coats of Paint Residency Program welcomes Bryce Speed, a painter and professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In his intriguing abstractions from 2023–24, Bryce embedded architectural structures but refrained from fully imparting the specificity required to identify a particular situation or place. Instead, he played with the position of shapes within the picture plane to create subtle relationships and illusions of space….
Contributed by Fay Sanders and Bob Szantyr / Spring fair season is here, and our annual tradition is to try to see as much art as possible in one day. This year, Spring/Break Art Show, located at 75 Varick Street, was less sprawling, recalliing the spirit and energy of the event’s earliest years. The location made it a quick trip from the Future Fair in Chelsea via the 1 train.
Contributed by Natasha Sweeten / Walk with me, backwards through time. See Jack Whitten painstakingly remove over two thousand tiles of hardened acrylic paint from his canvas. Watch as he assembles them into a large, flat plane, carefully unslices them from tiny squares, and then unsplatters and unpours the black and white paint. We’ve reached that final moment, in 1990, when the idea for The Messenger (for Art Blakey) is alive only in the artist’s mind. It is a fireball that has hurtled through years of searching, experimenting, suffering, loving, being lost, being overlooked, being angry — and now is ready to take hold….
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Daina Higgins began her vocation as an artist in the 1990s as a quintessential outsider: she was not only a graffiti artist in her native Columbus but also one of the few young women then so engaged there. Her noirish attraction to the oblique angles and ominous shadows of a presumptively benighted urban landscape in the Rust Belt has never flagged. At the same time, her paintings and drawings have acquired the existential gravitas that comes, if an artist has the requisite talent and mind, with the travails of life, the burden of lineage, and the compulsion to reflect on them.
Contributed by Jason Andrew / It’s refreshing and a little humbling to walk into a gallery and be blitzed by art that’s cleverly derived from years of play, probing, and practice. Rick Briggs’s solo show at Satchel Projects shows us how open-ended and liberating painting can be.
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
