An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Friday, January 23, 2026
Word is we’re heading into a supercharged hurricane season that could yield six to ten storms driving up the coast, but nothing can stop artists from returning to the city to mount fresh exhibitions. Among forthcoming shows, I’m especially looking forward to Mike Cloud at Thomas Erben, Gabby Collins-Fernandez at Rachel Uffner, Rico Gatson at Miles McEnery, Suzanne Jackson at Ortuzar Projects, Dennis Kardon at Lubov, Michael Krebber at Greene Naftali, Adam Simon…
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / September shows no sign of slowing down in the Hudson Valley, with numerous noteworthy exhibitions opening this month. IMAGE AFTER, a solo show of photo-based projects, sculpture, and drawing by Susan Magnus opens September 21 at the Garrison Art Center. On September 28, Susan Wides: Voice of Silence, opens at Private Public Gallery in Hudson. I’m looking forward to Understory: Snakes, Snails, and the Forest Floor at Pamela Salisbury…
Contributed by David Carrier / When the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently rehung its permanent European collection, the galleries devoted to Spanish art included an abundant selection of work from “New Spain,” as the vast Spanish empire was known during the colonial period. From 1521 to 1821, its territory included, among much more, what is now Mexico, Central America, and the US Southwest. Much of the art consisted of sacred baroque painting – arguably the first truly international art style. “Saints & Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain,” on view at the New Mexico Museum of Art, does it justice.
Contributed by Chunbum Park / At Picture Theory in Chelsea, Elias Wessel has assembled provocative installations titled “It’s Complicated” and, with composer and musician Natalia Kiёs, “Systems at Play.“ In “It’s Complicated,” busy photographs that document surfing and scrolling behavior stand on pedestals. Holstered at their sides are headphones piping cacophonic sounds and words – styled “Is Possibly Art” – that AI-based text-recognition software has distilled from the long-exposure images.
Contributed by Mark Wethli / Jay Stern’s paintings of domestic interiors and landscapes, now on view in his solo exhibition at Grant Wahlquist Gallery in Portland, Maine, invite us into familiar worlds but take us there in unexpected ways. The first time I saw his work – a series of paintings of a wooden drying rack – I admired how he transformed this humble, intimate household object into something iconic and worthy of attention. On a formal level, I was impressed by how the diamond pattern of the rack’s design served as a strong compositional framework, not unlike a trellis for an array of color patches whose abstract shapes, painterly shorthand, and understated yet luminous tonalities amplify our sense of the paintings’ warmth, intimacy, and human connection.
Contributed by Katy Crowe / In keeping with Sharon Butler’s recent review of painting that is not painting per se, Maxwell Hendler’s thoroughly satisfying show at The Landing in Los Angeles, his first in ten years, consists of works that fulfill the function of paintings — they are flat, largely two-dimensional, and mounted on walls – but do not involve paint at all.
Contributed by Adriana Furlong / Emma Helene Moriconi’s solo show “you and i are made from a worm eaten wood,” up earlier this summer at Galerie Timonier, prompted viewers to consider natural processes, large and small, more closely than usual. It was an interesting approach that seemed worth a conversation.
Contributed by Kun Kyung Sok / “Pouring Water Into Water,” Sarah Martin-Nuss’s first solo exhibition at the Rachel Uffner Gallery, comprises paintings and drawings that immerse viewers in fluid abstract landscapes inspired by marshes she remembers from her youth on Texas’s Gulf Coast. The paintings initially suggest serene swamps, their surfaces reflecting the sky and surrounding features. Deeper scrutiny uncovers two worlds closer by – one above the water paced by reeds swaying in a wet mist, and another below it teeming with aquatic creatures shimmering in the sunlight.
Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Out of the Blue” at Frosch & Co boasts a tight concept and adds real snap to the conversation presumed suspended until after Labor Day. The idea is to explore how the color blue ramifies through the lenses of different painters. That might seem like a merely modular survey, since other colors too have distinct connotations. But blue’s, as the gallery’s press statement notes, seem to swing more dramatically – between cool and warm, masculine and feminine, obscene and pure, barbaric and royal, stormy and serene. This quality makes for an unusually rich array.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / The 60th Venice Biennale runs through the fall. This storied, much imitated global event, like an Olympics or World’s Fair, consists of individual national pavilions and topical exhibitions. They occupy Venice’s Giardini and Arsenale. The Biennale generates numerous collateral exhibitions in palazzos, churches, and former warehouse spaces citywide. In addition to the officially sanctioned shows, there are a myriad unaffiliated exhibitions that try to pass themselves off as part of the Biennale by insinuation. It’s a lot to take in.
Contributed by A.V. Ryan / Jill Nathanson’s solo show “Chord Field” opened in late June at Berry Campbell Gallery. It is her fourth at the gallery but her first in its spacious, skylit new space. It seemed a fine opportunity to talk to her about her work, new and old.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / Welcome to the early August edition of the Two Coats painting-centric guide to art exhibitions in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Can it really be August already? Many galleries are finishing up their July shows this week and kicking back for the rest of the month, but some are extending their shows, so make sure to contact the gallery. We’re looking forward to checking out some new gallery locations — Harkawik, Sargent’s Daughters, Hesse Flatow, and Asya Geisberg have all moved to Tribeca. Marian Goodman and High Noon expect to be settled there in the fall. FYI, High Noon is trying to sublet their LES space from September through July 2025, so if your gallery is looking to move to a ground-floor space, give them a shout…
Contributed by Karlyn Benson / As the summer winds down it is a great time to escape the heat by exploring art spaces in the Catskills region, Western Connecticut, and the Berkshires. There are some notable group exhibitions opening or continuing in August including TWENTY/20 at the Athens Cultural Center, The Summer Disaster Show 2 at Private Public in Hudson, Groundswell at Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, and Back and Forth, Between Names at Ann Street Gallery in Newburgh….
Contributed by Riad Miah / After graduating from Pratt and spending a few years staging and curating pop-up shows and one-night events, Devon Gordon opened the ambitious new Zepster Gallery in Bushwick last May. The title of its second exhibition, now up, is “Oh, To Leave a Trace,” after a chapter of Mary Gabriel’s acclaimed book Ninth Street Women. The show features three female artists whose work continues in the contemplatively feminist vein that the book frames.
Contributed by David Carrier / Guillaume Lethière (1760–1832) was a very good French neoclassical painter. Respected and honored in the French art world, he served as director of the French Academy in Rome and was admired as a teacher. Consistent with this stature, the eponymous exhibition currently on view at The Clark Art Institute is robustly curated. In addition to abundantly contextualizing Lethière’s work, the exhibition materials document a life that embodied much of France’s complicated colonial history.
