01/08/25

Arcmanoro Niles @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - "When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart" Exhibition

Arcmanoro Niles
When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart
Lehmann Maupin, New York
Through  August 15, 2025
I’ve realized how important it is to take time to connect with the people and things you love, especially when you feel hopeless. These connections and the memory of these moments can remind us of who we are and what's important—and can provide answers on how to move forward. 
Arcmanoro Niles

Lehmann Maupin presents When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart, an exhibition of new paintings on canvas by New York-based artist ARCMANORO NILES. Known for his colorful paintings that capture the daily, yet intimate moments of contemporary life, Niles turns to portraiture and still life painting in his latest series, exploring the poignancy and vulnerability of deep emotional connections to ordinary places, objects, and people. Across the exhibition, Niles employs his signature vibrant color palette and swaths of glitter to render tight compositions and focused, singular subject matter, delving into personal relationships and memories—or as critic Seph Rodney writes, to make “oil and acrylic paintings that do something unconventional under the cloak of conventionality.” This presentation comes on the heels of Niles' recent inclusion in exhibitions at the Barberini Palace in Rome, the Museum Kampa in Prague, and the Parrish Museum in Water Mill, NY; the show also precedes a summer 2026 solo museum exhibition of Niles’ work at the Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY. 

Arcmanoro Niles is known for his brightly-hued paintings that expand our understanding of traditional genre painting and portraiture. His work offers a window into colloquial moments of daily life―a woman seated at a restaurant table, a child eating an apple, an elderly man playing checkers―with subjects drawn from photographs of friends and relatives and from memories of his past. In depicting not only people close to him but the places and times they inhabit, Niles creates his own record of contemporary life. The paintings, though intensely personal and autobiographical, engage in universal subjects of domestic and family life while referring to numerous art historical predecessors, including Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, and Color Field painting. Influenced by poetry, Niles’ titles often suggest an underlying narrative behind the seemingly mundane scenes; at the same time, by pairing his own words and images, he seeks to convey a universal sense of emotional experience. 

In When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart, Arcmanoro Niles’ compositions follow the logic of linear perspective, building environments and constructing scenes that feel lived and real. In contrast to this naturalistic structure, Niles’ treatment of his medium—both in color scheme and in the visible materiality of the paint—add an otherworldly or surreal quality to the works. Throughout his oeuvre and in this series, he makes unconventional choices when it comes to color, developing singular hues directly on the canvas by layering strokes of paint over a neon ground; his subjects’ dark skin tones are rendered with shades of blue or orange, clouds or flames are bright pink, and moments of glitter leap off the picture plane, as though hovering over its surface. The works in When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart are painted in a technicolor palette that constructs a signature kind of chiaroscuro, which serves to heighten both the drama and intimacy of his compositions. 

Across the exhibition, Arcmanoro Niles immerses himself in his intimate relationships to specific people and settings, capturing and elevating their essence through artmaking; his paintings crystallize memory, freezing moments in time. In In Between the Glory Days and Golden Years (200 Miles from Where I’ve Been) (2025), for example, Niles situates the viewer across the dining table from his subject—in this case, a middle-aged woman with glittering pink hair and a plaid shirt—with a piece of carrot cake in between, ready to be shared. To the subject’s left, the arm of a younger companion is just visible, suggesting the woman is part of a larger, celebratory gathering, perhaps intended to connect loved ones and mark a milestone. Arcmanoro Niles’ composition implicates the viewer, along with their own familial ties and memories of the passage of time, in the narrative. In this way, Niles invites viewers to commune with their own inner lives and memories through interaction with his own.  

In his deeply personal Where Do I Turn to When I Can’t Take It Anymore (All the Hope I Had I Hope I Wasn’t Wrong) (2025), the lone self-portrait in the series, Niles turns fully inward. Painted in melancholic shades of teal and periwinkle, the artist depicts himself lying in bed on his side next to an open box of tissues, his eyes open and looking vaguely ahead. The composition suggests a certain sadness—Niles’ forlorn expression is one of longing, or perhaps even heartbreak, probing loneliness and solitude in the wake of loss. Here and across the exhibition, Arcmanoro Niles finds solace in connecting with others through the universal language of art marking, seeking to harness its capacity for catharsis and transformation. He finds solace in the mundane and everyday, “painting what he knows” to seek meaning and preserve memory. 

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK
501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

Arcmanoro Niles: When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart
Lehmann Maupin, New York, June 12 – August 15, 2025

Rose Wylie @ Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern - "Flick and Float" Retrospective Exhibition

Rose Wylie. Flick and Float
Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern 
19 July - 5 October 2025 

Rose Wylie Photo in her studio
Rose Wylie in her studio
, June 2023
Photograph: Will Grundy
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

Rose Wylie. Flick and Float presents the nonconformist and fascinating work of the British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934). Her unique artistic practice has won her international recognition. In her large-format paintings, Rose Wylie strips down figurative representations to their essentials. Expressive, direct and full of subversive humour, these works testify to her engagement with pop culture, film and art history. With more than fifty paintings and around a dozen drawings, the Zentrum Paul Klee is showing a retrospective of Wylie’s work over the last thirty years. New works have been made for the exhibition.

Rose Wylie
Rose Wylie
Dinner Outside, 2024
Oil on canvas, 183 × 328 cm, two parts
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Jack Hems

Rose Wylie
Rose Wylie
Lilith and Gucci Boy, 2024
Oil on canvas, 207 × 306 cm, two parts
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Jack Hems

Rose Wylie - An unconventional career: from reading to seeing

The ninety-year-old artist lives and works in a cottage not far from London. Rose Wylie received her artistic training at Folkestone and Dover School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Royal College of Art in London. While raising her three children, she put her artistic career on pause, and, alongside her family life, spent a lot of time reading books. It was not until the late 1990s that seeing took over from reading again, as Rose Wylie explained on a visit to her studio in March 2024. She started devoting herself intensively to painting again, and finally achieved international recognition with her unique work and major solo exhibitions, at Tate Britain in London and elsewhere. The Zentrum Paul Klee is devoting a major retrospective to Rose Wylie featuring over fifty paintings and around a dozen drawings. The artist has painted eight works specially for the exhibition, which are being shown to a museum-going public for the first time in the Zentrum Paul Klee.

Rose Wylie
Rose Wylie
Jesus of Prague, 1989
Oil on canvas, 184 × 183 cm
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Anna Arca

Rose Wylie
Rose Wylie
Manor, 2004
Oil on canvas, 183 × 188 cm
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon
© Rose Wylie
Photograph courtesy of Jari Lager

Rose Wylie
Rose Wylie
The Fat Controller, 2006
Oil on canvas, 366 × 248 cm, four parts
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon
© Rose Wylie
Photograph courtesy of Jari Lager

Rose Wylie - Inspiration from pop culture, film and art history

Rose Wylie’s large-format works, made in the studio on the first floor of her cottage, reflect a deep understanding of pop culture, film and art history. She often works with a subversive humour that also connects her to Paul Klee. Stripped down to its essentials, and with a highly expressive lightness of touch, her artistic language references an aesthetic of ‘bad painting’ and post pop. On closer examination, Wylie’s works prove to be sharply observed and subtly polished meditations on the nature of humanity.

Rose Wylie
Rose Wylie
Singing Life Model, 2017
Oil on canvas, 169 × 182 cm
Karen and Mark Smith
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Anna Arca

Rose Wylie
Rose Wylie
Yellow Strip, 2006
Oil on canvas, 183 × 777 cm, five parts
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner
Photo: Jack Hems

For Rose Wylie, the process by which a painting is made often begins with a visual stimulus. No limits are placed on her inspiration. As indicated by the title of the exhibition, Flick and Float – the artist’s own suggestion – in her working process Wylie ‘flicks’ through a flood of images until a motif attracts her attention. The motif might be a newspaper photograph on her studio floor, a scene from a film, an everyday situation from her life, an artwork or a picture that she found while surfing the internet. What the motifs share, however, is always a special detail that does not match the norm – ‘Toujours la difference!’ is a phrase of which Rose Wylie is particularly fond. So for example, in Singing Life Model, Rose Wylie shows a photographic model posing with a strangely opened mouth, while Yellow Strip shows the football star Ronaldinho with his characteristically thin pony tail, which whips in time with his every movement on the pitch.

Rose Wylie - Painting from memory

Rose Wylie usually begins by capturing her visual impressions in drawings. The drawings in the exhibition provide an insight into her creative process. Rose Wylie does not return to the reference material, but with a few strokes reduces the picture in her memory to what she sees as essential. Speaking of her ‘Film Notes’, for example, she explains:
‘When I do film paintings, I usually work from memory […] – I do not go back to the film or to film stills to check… It’s the original visual excitement I want to work with.’
Rose Wylie, on the letter ‘F’ in the A–Z of the catalogue Rose Wylie. Flick and Float
Rose Wylie then reworks the drawing until the composition and central details are consistent. If lines have to be corrected, Rose Wylie does not erase them, but sticks a new piece of paper over them, which sometimes makes the sketches look like collages. This process of discovery is also repeated on the big canvases in Wylie’s studio. Where necessary, Rose Wylie scrapes the oil paint off again and adds whole new parts of canvases. This genesis provides the second part of the exhibition title, because Rose Wylie describes the process by which her works are created as ‘floating’.

Rose Wylie - Compositional investigations with picture and writing 

Rose Wylie
Rose Wylie
Bagdad Cafe (Film Notes), 2015
Oil on canvas, 182 × 372 cm, two parts
Courtesy of the British Council Collection
Photo: Soon-Hak Kwon
© Rose Wylie. Courtesy the artist
Photograph courtesy of Jari Lager

Rose Wylie develops pictorial compositions that go beyond traditional perspectival representation. In her multi-panel works, for example, she juxtaposes apparently disparate images, giving rise to visual rhymes and resonances. One example is the two-part work Bagdad Cafe (Film Notes): while in the left half of the painting Rose Wylie reworks visual stimuli from the film of the same name, in the right half she shows scenes from her everyday life – including a flower from her garden, her own mouth when eating and a coffee stain.
‘I spell often phonetically – I paint how things look and I spell how things sound.’
Rose Wylie, in an interview with Fabienne Eggelhöfer during a visit to her studio in January 2025
Rose Wylie also includes writing as part of the composition of her works. What is central here is not so much the content of what is written as the form and arrangement of the letters on the picture surface. She places the writing deliberately to perfect her compositions. The process of writing is more important than the correct way of writing. For this reason Rose Wylie often writes words as she hears them, spelled incorrectly. Her writing style can be experienced in the A–Z section of the exhibition catalogue. In reflections on 26 ideas, Rose Wylie provides a deeper insight into her intellectual world.

Rose Wylie - Biography

Rose Wylie was born in 1934 in Hythe, in Kent in England. She lived with her family in India until the age of five. Her return to England coincided with the outbreak of the Second World War, which Rose Wylie experienced as a child.

Beginning in 1952 she studied painting at Folkestone and Dover School of Art. From 1956 she continued her training at Goldsmiths College in London with a view to teaching. It was here that she met her husband, the artist Roy Oxlade. When their first child was born she put her artistic career on pause and concentrated on the family. In the 1970s she taught painting at Sittingbourne College of Further Education. From 1979 she resumed her artistic activity by studying for a Masters at the Royal College of Art in London.

She began to submit her works for exhibitions with an open application procedure, which was how she came to be selected by Neo Rauch for EAST International at Norwich University of the Arts in 2004. In 2010 her works were shown in the exhibition Women to Watch at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, which led the feminist Germaine Greer to describe her as the ‘hottest new artist’ in an article in The Guardian. In 2013 she had her first institutional solo exhibition at Tate Britain in London, and won the renowned John Moores Painting Prize the following year. She was also appointed a Senior Royal Academician of the Royal Academy in London. Further exhibitions followed, including shows at the Serpentine Gallery in London (2017), in the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo in Málaga (2017), Aspen Art Museum in Colorado (2020), Hangaram Art Museum in Seoul (2021) and the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent (2022) to name only a few. Next year her works will be shown at the Royal Academy in London. 

Rose Wylie. Flick and Float - Catalogue of the exhibition
Rose Wylie. Flick and Float
Catalogue of the exhibition ; Snoeck Verlag, 2025
Published by Fabienne Eggelhöfer and Nina Zimmer
With an A–Z by Rose Wylie, photographs by Juergen Teller, 
as well as a foreword by Nina Zimmer, 
Director of the Kunstmuseum Bern – Zentrum Paul Klee, 
and an introduction by Fabienne Eggelhöfer, 
Chief Curator at the Zentrum Paul Klee.
136 pages ; Language: English ; ISBN 978-3-86442-464-9

Curator: Fabienne Eggelhöfer
Curatorial assistant: Josephine Rechberg

ZENTRUM PAUL KLEE 
Monument im Fruchtland 3, 3006 Bern

Stephen Pace @ Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland - "A Lifetime in Paint" Exhibition

Stephen Pace 
A Lifetime in Paint
Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland
August 2025

Throughout his long and productive career, STEPHEN PACE (1918-2010) made significant contributions to American painting as a prominent member of the New York School, known for his forceful abstract expressionist paintings and later luminous representational paintings and watercolors, which were inspired in large part by his home and surroundings in Stonington, Maine. As art critic and writer Carl Little notes in the exhibition catalog, "From humble beginnings in the Midwest to the artistic hotbed of Abstract Expressionism in New York City to the working waterfront of his Maine home, this artist carried a lifetime's worth of commitment to paint."

Born in Charleston, Missouri, in 1918, Stephen Pace began his art studies at age 17 with WPA artist Robert Lahr in Evansville, Indiana. After serving in World War II, he continued his studies on the GI Bill at the Instituto Allende in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where he met Milton Avery, who became a lifelong friend and mentor. The two artists shared a kinship in outlook, an economy of color, line, and form, as well as an involvement in art as a way of life.

In 1953, Stephen Pace made his first trip to Maine, traveling down the coast to the small fishing village of Stonington on Deer Isle, which would become his longtime summer home. In 2007, Stephen Pace bequeathed his house and studio in Stonington to the Maine College of Art & Design as an artist residency to ensure its continued use as an artistic haven and inspiration for future generations.

Featuring more than two dozen oil paintings and watercolors, Stephen Pace: A Lifetime in Paint includes prime examples of the artist's abstract expressionist canvases and favorite recurring motifs—sunflowers, the working waterfront, horses, the figure in the landscape, and the lily pond near his Stonington home.

Celebrated for his radiant use of color and agility in distilling the essence of a subject in succinct and telling strokes, Stephen Pace's work has been the subject of over 85 solo exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the United States. It is represented in over 50 museum collections, and the subject of the monograph Stephen Pace (Hudson Hills, 2004), with text by art historian Martica Sawin.

DOWLING WALSH GALLERY
357 Main Street, Rockland, Maine 04841