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

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Arcmanoro Niles: When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart

Lehmann Maupin, New York, June 12 – August 15, 2025

Arcmanoro Niles @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - Hey Tomorrow, Do You Have Some Room For Me: Failure Is A Part Of Being Alive

Arcmanoro Niles: Hey Tomorrow, Do You Have Some Room For Me: Failure Is A Part Of Being Alive 

Lehmann Maupin, New York 

June 3 - August 28, 2021 

Lehmann Maupin presents Hey Tomorrow, Do You Have Some Room For Me: Failure Is A Part Of Being Alive, the gallery’s first exhibition with New York-based painter ARCMANORO NILES. Featuring a series of new portraits, still lives, and a single landscape, this exhibition continues the artist’s critical investigation into the function and form of historically revered genres in painting. Arcmanoro Niles is best known for his vivid, brightly-hued canvases that illustrate the seemingly mundane aspects of daily life―a man about to get into his car, a father and daughter sitting on their stoop with their dog, a woman waiting at a bus stop. His subjects are drawn from photographs of friends and relatives and from memories of his past, offering a highly personal record of contemporary life. The paintings, though autobiographical, engage with universal subjects of desire, hope, fear, and failure, while also recalling numerous art historical predecessors, including Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, Color Field painting, and ancient Egyptian sculpture. For Hey Tomorrow, Niles has created a number of his distinct portraits, but the exhibition also features still lives and interiors that become surrogates for the figure―a cluttered bedside table, a urine test in a doctor’s office bathroom, or a kitchen table littered with liquor bottles and food containers.

The works in Hey Tomorrow each represent the many perceived failures that we experience during the course of our lives that, when taken as a whole, are simply what make us human. For Arcmanoro Niles, these moments―getting kicked out of the house or an unplanned pregnancy―are not extraordinary events, but rather just part of the course of life. In Kicked Out the House for Living Fast (I Never Held Love in My Gaze so I Searched for it Every Couple of Days), 2021, a young man wearing sunglasses, an Under Armour t-shirt and sweatpants, pauses to look directly at the viewer before getting into his car. The scene is rendered in a fiery pink that alludes to the underlying emotional tone indicated by the title. In this work, Niles marks a key moment in his subject’s life―a difficult one, but also one of growth and transformation. “All of these moments in life that people look at as failures are just a part of growing up and can actually open new doors and lead to new phases in life,” the artist explains, “when I look back at my own experiences, they weren’t really failures at all.” As is typical of Niles’ work, in Kicked Out the House for Living Fast the figure’s brown skin is rendered with a gold-like tone, his hair a glimmering halo of hot pink glitter. This is a nod to the influence of baroque and religious painting, making Niles’ figures appear saint-like, but also formally allowing the artist to achieve a level of depth and tonality in his rendering of brown skin.

A signature aspect of Arcmanoro Niles’ practice is his use of vibrant oranges, pinks, purples, blues, and greens, which he often layers, color after color, to create a luminous glow. For this series, Arcmanoro Niles has deliberately left some of his “underpainting” exposed so that the keyed-up areas of oranges, pinks, and greens are even more saturated, creating heightened intensity even within his most seemingly mundane compositions. Running Until You’re Nothing Sounds a Lot Like Being Free (Don’t be Sad), 2021, is a bright orange still life that shows a bedside table almost entirely covered with objects―a flashlight, a wallet, a medicine bottle, crumpled up receipts, tequila bottles, a sports drink, and a reusable water bottle. The corner of the bed is barely visible and one of Arcmanoro Niles’ “seekers” is draping its legs over the side, perhaps in ecstasy, exhaustion, or intoxication. Arcmanoro Niles’ seekers, which take the form of small, gestural characters and more fleshy, gremlin-like figures, represent our most basic human impulses and desires. “Seekers,” says Arcmanoro Niles, “are more impulsive, chasing whatever they think will make them happy in that moment, with no fear of consequence, while the human subjects are more vulnerable and open with their feelings.” The title of the work, the collection of objects, and the partially visible seeker stand in for the subject who would occupy the space. Running Until You’re Nothing illustrates a person pushing their body to the limit in pursuit of the sense of escape that pleasure so often offers in the short term. The parenthetical in the title, “don’t be sad,” suggests that the drive for gratification becomes difficult to disengage from as the subject feels compelled to continue drinking, using drugs, and otherwise self- medicating in order to avoid facing encroaching feelings of sadness hovering just at the perimeter.

The titular work in the exhibition is the only landscape featured and the first Arcmanoro Niles has created in his professional career. The painting, Hey Tomorrow, Do You Have Some Room For Me (Failure is a Part of Being Alive), depicts an idyllic view from the edge of a body of water. The surface is blue and calm, a tree occupies the left side of the composition, and the foreground is marked by a row of rocks. The clouds are a vibrant pink that stand in stark contrast to the pale blue sky. The serene scene is the outlier in the exhibition and offers the viewer “room” for contemplation, self-reflection, a moment of pause in the otherwise dense body of work. In depicting not only people close to him but the places and times they inhabit, Niles creates his own chronicle of life today. Each painting invites us to consider the time in which it was made, as well as our own histories―our struggles, successes, and desires for the future. While most of the paintings represent the past and the present, for Niles, the painting Hey Tomorrow offers space to imagine tomorrow, and what might come next.

ARCMANORO NILES

Arcmanoro Niles received a BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA in 2013 and an MFA from New York Academy of Art, New York, NY in 2015. Solo exhibitions of his work have recently been organized at UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY (2019); Long Gallery, New York, NY (2017); and Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY (2016). His work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Young Gifted and Black, The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY (2020); Afrocosmologies: American Reflections, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2019); Punch, Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA (2019); On Refusal: Representation & Resistance in Contemporary American Art, The MAC Belfast, Northern Ireland (2019); Problem Solving: Highlights from the Experimental Printmaking Institute, Mechanical Hall Gallery, University of Delaware, Newark, DE (2018); Portraits of Who We Are, David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD (2018); and Mutual Interest No. 3, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China (2014).

His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Petrucci Family Foundation Collection of African American Art, Asbury, NJ; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and the Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China.

LEHMANN MAUPIN

501 W 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

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