Award-winning NYC blogazine with a focus on painting
Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Contributed by Leslie Roberts / In “Polychrome,” Bernay Fine Art presents paintings by three painters – Jenny Kemp, Audrey Stone, and Deborah Zlotsky – who all create striking chromatic relationships by organizing color in structures of parallel strips. The show makes clear how much lurks beneath these general descriptions. It’s a pleasure to study these paintings side by side and consider each artist’s singular use of color and paint.
Contributed by Leslie Roberts / During a recent tour of downtown galleries, I saw several consecutive shows presenting tightly programmed bodies of work. In exhibit after exhibit, the pieces were uniform in size, homogeneous in strategy, and made of standardized, highly finished components. Even some strong exhibits felt overly glossy, suffused with a commodified quality. Molly Rose Lieberman’s “The Candles Are on the Table,” at Theta Gallery, was a welcome relief. Each painting and sculpture has a particular format and resolution that the artist appears to have arrived at in the making.
Contributed by Leslie Roberts / The exhibition “Abstract by Definition” at Art Cake celebrates the 90th anniversary of the American Abstract Artists (AAA). The show is subtitled “An Index,” but is not one in the usual sense – not, that is, an itemized set of categories, styles, intentions, or formal languages defining abstract art. Curator Saul Ostrow has instead organized groups of several works – usually four. This installation effectively highlights the particular qualities of each piece, and emphasizes the diversity of what we call contemporary abstraction.
Contributed by Leslie Roberts / Gabriele Evertz’s new paintings are a song cycle in color. Some of her previous shows had singular emotional states as themes; “Rapture” and “Exaltation” are two. But in her new solo “Path” at Minus Space, six large square canvases extend the concept, forming a chromatic narrative – an emotional journey through the pandemic to the present. They start in despair and isolation, move through night with glints of hope, break sharply, and conclude, not with sadness but with strength in a belief in the urgency of color in life. Evertz, whom some might call quintessentially modernist, sees her new work as neo-Romantic.
Contributed by Jenny Zoe Casey / I recently set out on a five-hour solo road trip from Chicago to Newark, Ohio, to see “Material Investment,” a group show opening at The Bank. I anticipated a first-rate exhibition and was not disappointed. Curated by Leslie Roberts, the show features eleven artists: Lisha Bai, Sean Desiree, Tracey Goodman, Ruth Jeyaveeran, Amanda Love, Alex Paik, Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Vadis Turner, Kevin Umaña, Mandy Cano Villalobos, and Jeff Wallace. As Roberts notes in her curatorial statement, the artists in this show are “dedicated to particular materials, and each artist intently subverts or stretches those materials’ properties and typical forms.”
The following is a series of excerpts from an ongoing conversation between painters Cyrilla Mozenter and Leslie Roberts. Their concurrent solo exhibitions will open at 57W57 Arts on Thursday, November 11.
