Vicky Colombet, Stuart Middleton, Valerio Nicolai, Yutaka Nozawa, Minh Lan Tran, Alix Vernet
Six
Chapter NY Gallery, New York
June 27 - August 8, 2025
Chapter NY presents Six, a group exhibition featuring works by Vicky Colombet, Stuart Middleton, Valerio Nicolai, Yutaka Nozawa, Minh Lan Tran, and Alix Vernet. The exhibition explores states of perception, embodiment, and transformation. Across painting, sculpture, video, and drawing, the six artists reflect on the act of shaping, whether by human or environmental forces, emphasizing a continual state of becoming.
Stuart Middleton’s graphite drawings belong to an ongoing series based on photographs of industrial meat processing machinery. They transform functional mechanisms into imaginary architectures, suggesting everything from Futurist prototypes to science fiction landscapes. Seen from the viewpoint of the processed, the works conjure an uncanny, visceral space—both coldly mechanical and disturbingly organic—extending Middleton’s long-standing inquiry into the abstraction of the body in modern systems of labor, consumption, and control.
Abstract paintings by Vicky Colombet embody the artist’s meditative relationship to process and meticulous brushwork. Her atmospheric surfaces evoke elemental forces—breaking ice, dissolving forms, geological drift—suggesting the invisible rhythms and transformations of the natural world. Colombet’s practice emerges from a deep engagement with landscape, natural pigments, and quantum theory, cultivating a vision of abstraction rooted in stillness and flux. In Quantum Gold Fields (2025), she introduces gold pigment into her expanding body of work.
With a focus on resistance, ritual, and political embodiment, Minh Lan Tran’s painting embraces language and movement as co-constitutive forces. Drawing from her background in calligraphy, theology, and choreography, Tran composes works that trace physical intensities, with gestures referencing spiritual-political actions—from protest chants to self-immolations—foregrounding embodiment over representation.
By shifting perspectives, Yutaka Nozawa quietly disrupts conventional perceptions of time and space. Diptychs from his ongoing CANVAS series include one painting depicting a blank canvas installed in an interior space paired with a photograph of the same canvas painted to portray the setting in which it hangs. These works engage with still life conventions, offering a subtle and humorous meditation on seeing, representation, and the fluidity of perception. Nozawa also includes li (2025), a durational video of a bird resting on top of a post, captured over an extended period of time.
Valerio Nicolai’s paintings of imagined structures draw from the visual languages of still life, architecture, and absurdist narrative. Fusing elements of humor and drama, Nicolai’s canvases depict surreal spaces populated by castle-like constructions. His deadpan imagery complicates art historical tropes, embedding allegories of decay, doubt, and regeneration into every constructed scene. These are paintings that wobble between the banal and the eternal, the poetic and the grotesque.
For her ongoing series of Heat Exchange Poems, Alix Vernet makes floor and wall-based sculptures with repurposed AC unit condensers. The backs of AC units become surfaces for tactile inscription, bearing found and added marks: scratches, tags, smudges, handprints. These traces function like accidental archives— a body, a prayer, a memory. By staging these altered objects in the gallery, Vernet reanimates the condenser as both a transient summer relic and a fossilized site of urban encounters.
Together, the works in Six propose a mutable world in which matter, perception, and form remain open to transformation. In this space of continuous re-making, each artist traces how we are shaped and how we shape in return.
Vicky Colombet (b. 1953, Paris, France) lives and works between New York City, the Hudson Valley, and Paris. Colombet has had solo exhibitions at Fernberger, Los Angeles, CA; The Elkon Gallery, New York, NY; Galerie Dutko, Paris, FR; Museé Marmottan Monet, Paris, FR; Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York, NY, among others. Her work is included in numerous public and private collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, FR; the Museum of Fine Arts, St Petersburg, FL; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. She is the Recipient of the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Foundation Grant (2001) and the Pollock- Krasner Foundation Grant (2014).
Stuart Middleton (b.1987 Crewe, UK) lives and works communally in West Wales. He received his BA in Painting from Camberwell College of Art, London in 2009 and graduated from HBK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, Germany in 2016. Middleton has had solo exhibitions at Chapter NY, New York; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; Clementin Seedorf, Cologne; Kunstlerhaus Graz; Tramway, Glasgow; and ICA London, among others. His work has been shown in group exhibitions at Villa Imperiale, Pesaro; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Greene Naftali, New York; Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Kunsthaus Glarus; and Camden Arts Centre, London; among others.
Valerio Nicolai (b. 1988, Gorizia, Italy) lives and works in Milan, Italy. He studied at Accademia di Belle Arti di Veneziain. Nicolai was awarded the Licini Prize in 2023 and the 2020-21 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant. He has had solo exhibitions at: Museo Osvaldo Licini, Ascoli Piceno, IT; Campoli Presti, Paris, FR; Clima, Milan, IT; Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon, SP; Las Palmas Project, Lisbon, SP; smART Foundation, Rome, IT. His work has been shown in group exhibitions at MAMbo, Bologna, IT; MADRE Museum, Naples, IT; Casa Testori, Milan, IT; MAXXI L’Aquila, L’Aquila, IT; Triennale, Milano, IT; MACTE, Termoli, IT; Fondazione Zimei at Teatro Michetti, Pescara, IT; Fondazione Zimei, Pescara, IT; All Stars, Lausanne, CH; Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon, SP; Palazzo Monti, Brescia, IT; GAM Torino, Turin, IT; Quadriennale Arte 2020, Roma, IT; Spirit Vessel, Espinavessa, SP; Marselleria, Milan, IT; Palazzo Cavour, Turin, IT.
Yutaka Nozawa (b. 1983, Shizuoka, Japan) lives and works in Shizuoka, Japan. He received his BFA from Tokyo Zokei University, Tokyo, and his MFA from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, Tokyo. He also received his MFA in Photography from IED Madrid.
Yutaka has presented his work at: KAYOKOYUKI, Tokyo, JP; Condo London 2024 at Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK; void+, Tokyo, JP; THE UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM, Tokyo, JP; TMMT Art Projects, Tokyo, JP; UTRECHT, Tokyo, JP; Intercambiador ACART, Madrid, SP; Galería Santa Fe - La Decanatura, COL; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Shizuoka, JP.
Minh Lan Tran (b. 1997, Hong Kong) lives and works in Paris, France. She received her MA in Byzantine studies and visual theology from the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (2020) and an MA in Painting from The Royal College of Art, London (2023). She studied Art History at the Ecole du Louvre, Paris and the University of Oxford. Her works have been exhibited at High Art, Seoul, KR; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA; Balice Hertling, Paris, FR; House, Berlin, DE; Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK; the Museum of the Home, London, UK; the Royal College of Art, London, UK; the House of Annetta, London, UK; and the San Mei Gallery, London, UK.
Alix Vernet (b. 1997) lives and works in New York City. She received a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles and completed a MFA in Sculpture at Yale. Vernet has had solo exhibitions at Helena Anrather, New York, NY; and group exhibitions at Museion, Bolzano, IT; the Gund Gallery, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA; and Soft Opening, London, UK. Her photographs have been published by Dashwood Books, and she has received critical recognition in Frieze, Texte Zur Kunst, Artforum, and Art in America.
CHAPTER NY
60 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013
