Friedrich Kunath @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'Aimless Love' Exhibition

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York

Through December 20, 2025

Friedrich Kunath 

You Told That Joke Twice, 2024-2025 

© Friedrich Kunath, courtesy Pace Gallery

Photography by Evan Walsh

Pace presents an exhibition of new paintings by Friedrich Kunath at its 510 West 25th Street gallery in New York. This is the artist’s first solo show in the city since 2019 and his debut presentation with the gallery, which began representing him in May 2025. The exhibition coincides with the release of a new monograph from Monacelli tracing Kunath’s work from the last 30 years. This publication features a new essay by Naomi Fry, staff writer at The New Yorker.

Known for his layered, lyrical work across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video, the German-born, Los Angeles-based artist reimagines rich and diverse source material in cathartic images and objects. Many of Kunath’s paintings depict vibrant landscapes of worldly beauty, often incorporating poetic phrases and quotations from music, film, and literature. Drawing inspiration from Romanticism, popular culture, and his own personal history, he imbues his art with a myriad of seemingly disparate references and resonances, navigating the murky spaces between irony and sincerity, tragedy and comedy. Thereby, Kunath sees himself as a composer of ideas and images across mediums, working fragments into artworks that become worlds unto themselves.

His first presentation at Pace in New York, Aimless Love, meditates on coming and going, free from intent, with aimless momentum. The works are inspired by the artist’s memories of listening to music while traveling by train or car as a child, looking out the window and watching the world pass by. With his new paintings, Friedrich Kunath aims to immortalize the sense of total presence in those memories and experiences, while acknowledging the paradox of trying to hold onto an inherently fleeting, ephemeral feeling.

Installed in ascending and descending orientations that evoke an airplane’s trajectories during takeoff and landing, Kunath’s latest paintings lean more heavily into a meditative, contemplative space than his past bodies of work. These filmic, deeply personal compositions depict expansive seas and crashing waves, rugged cliffsides, scenic roads, and sweeping vistas, exploring moments of connection and loneliness, love and longing, absurdity and wonder. Seen through the windshield or mirrors of a car, the outside world takes on new resonances in the new works. In I Hope Future Me Is Happy (2024–25), a car rounds the bend of a mountain highway, about to disappear but still in sight. In another, a plane glides through a golden sky with the setting sun blazing through its windows. With Have Love, Will Travel (2025), Friedrich Kunath situates the viewer on the passenger side of a car, a decision that reflects his view of his artistic role.

Kunath’s process for these paintings brings forth a dialogue between the unconscious and the representational image. At the start, he embeds abstractions and writings into wet impasto on his canvases. These underside paintings are made in isolation of the image that is created on top, but, in the end, there is a miraculous synchronicity between the two layers— his writings in the dried, textural impasto are legible in his finished paintings, bringing new meanings and juxtapositions to his compositions. With this “voice coming from behind the image,” Kunath says, he invites the viewer to make their own readings of the work.

In addition to paintings, Aimless Love includes a new sculpture titled Following the Feeling (2025), comprised of one pair of dress shoes, shoelaces, wire, and nylon string. This work is a more somber, existential take on Kunath’s 2009 installation LA Trainer (Permanent Reminder Of A Temporary Feeling)—a new iteration of an artwork that he produced early in his career.

Beyond his exhibition at Pace in New York, Kunath’s work can be found in the collections of the city’s Museum of Modern Art and the Marieluise Hessel Collection at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.

Artist Friedrich Kunath

Friedrich Kunath (b. 1974, Chemnitz, Germany) works across painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, and video to create resonant, evocative, and often melancholy compositions. Based in Los Angeles since 2007, Friedrich Kunath creates work grounded in his experiences on the West Coast of the United States and his enduring relationship with Europe. His art combines references to German Romanticism and American popular culture, and it is informed, in part, by his interests in music, tennis, cars, and the practice of collecting. Kunath's paintings depict vibrant landscapes of otherworldly beauty, and he often incorporates poetic phrases and quotations from music or film into his canvases, forging a visual language distinguished by interplays of wit, emotional depth, and cultural memory. The artist graduated from Braunschweig University of Arts, Germany, in 1998.

Recent solo exhibitions of his work include Friedrich Kunath: Coming Home Was as Beautiful as Going Away, KINDLCentre for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023); Friedrich Kunath: I Remain Exhausted, Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2024); Friedrich Kunath: I Need Solitude, But I Also Need You, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel (2024); Friedrich Kunath: AT THIS POINT IN MY LIFE (I'LL HAVE THE CALAMARI), G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, Germany (2024); and Friedrich Kunath: One Day I’ll Follow the Byrds (Tutto Pasta), Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin (2024). 

Friedrich Kunath’s work is held in prominent public collections worldwide, including the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, California; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, among others. 

PACE GALLERY NEW YORK

510 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Pace Gallery, New York, November 7 – December 20, 2025

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of 

Helene Schjerfbeck

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

December 5, 2025 – April 5, 2026

Helene Schjerfbeck (Finnish, 1862‒1946)

Self-Portrait, 1912 

Oil on canvas, 17 1/8 × 16 1/2 in. (43.5 × 42 cm) 

Finnish National Gallery Collection, 

Ateneum Art Museum, Helsinki (A-2016-51) 

Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis

Beloved in Nordic countries for her highly original style, Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946) is relatively unknown to the rest of the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is the first major exhibition in the United States dedicated to the artist’s work. Featuring nearly 60 works on canvas—including generous loans from the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum, other Finnish museums, and private collections in Finland and Sweden—the exhibition will be on view December 5, 2025, through April 5, 2026.

Born in Helsinki, Helene Schjerfbeck witnessed civil war and two World Wars as well as the burgeoning of Finland’s national identity following independence from Russian rule in 1917. Despite many personal hardships, Helene Schjerfbeck never wavered in her determination to pursue her passion, painting for most of her life in a remote Nordic country, far removed from Europe’s centers of cultural upheaval and renewal. She once said resolutely, “All that I desire to do is to paint… there is always something to conquer.”

“Seeing Silence highlights the work of an extraordinary artist who, though long celebrated in Norway and Sweden as the most outstanding female painter of her time, has not yet achieved well-deserved visibility on this side of the Atlantic,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “The exhibition invites audiences here to experience Helene Schjerfbeck’s mesmerizing works and distinctive vision for the first time at a major U.S. museum, showcasing the remarkable perspective and introspection of an artist wholly dedicated to her craft over the course of eight decades.”

Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met, said, “Painting in remote Finland without recourse to broader culture and the exchange of contemporary ideas, Schjerfbeck created her own language every day at her easel by sheer force of will. Seeing Silence looks beyond art history’s cultural mainstream to one woman who overcame immense struggles to produce a powerful body of work, highlighting her rightful place in the story of modernism.”

Seeing Silence traces Schjerfbeck’s artistic development from her early years in Helsinki to the end of her life in Sweden, illuminating the artist’s evolving style from traditional subjects in a naturalist vein to a painterly language of spare, often densely worked imagery. Schjerfbeck sanded and scratched through layers of paint, sometimes exposing the rough weave of her canvases as she experimented with her materials. As a valuable voice among the many strands of modernism at play throughout the world in the early 20th century, Schjerfbeck expressed a unique visual language that deserves recognition in the codified narratives of art history.

The exhibition unfolds thematically, beginning with an exploration of Schjerfbeck’s early years. Recognized as a prodigy at a young age, she won several grants to study in Paris and from there she took excursions to Concarneau in Brittany and later St Ives in Cornwall. Many of her early figure studies were painted in the art schools of Paris, while her more sentimental genre subjects reflect her rural travels. Schooled among artists working in naturalism, she created figure painting and landscapes that followed in step. Within a few years, she was showing paintings at the Salon, Paris’s annual art exhibition, and testing the boundaries of conservative painting.

In the next section, several large-scale canvases commemorate Finnish heritage. After centuries of Swedish occupation, followed by Russian rule, Finland was affirming its cultural identity. A history painting won Schjerfbeck a grant to study in Paris. Later, her compelling allusion to the Jewish festival of Sukkot earned her entrée to the annual state-sponsored Salon in 1883.

In 1902, Helene Schjerfbeck moved to Hyvinkää, a small railroad town several hours north of Helsinki, to care for her aging mother. The isolation of a rural setting enabled her to paint without the disruptions of city life. In modest accommodations and without access to professional models, she painted some of her most affecting canvases, often single figures dressed in black with little color to interrupt their dark silhouettes. Her mother, despite having no interest in her daughter’s vocation, was co-opted to model on several occasions. By this point in her career, Helene Schjerfbeck had radically redefined her aesthetic language. Soft brushwork characterizes these quiet paintings. Whether sitting or standing, reading or sewing, her subjects fill the picture plane and avert their gaze. Often bathed in raking light, her figures appear lost in thought and lost in time. Helene Schjerfbeck investigates formal language—light, space, volume—not the soul of the sitter. She told her models to look away as she painted them, demanded their silence, and refused to show them the end result. Essential to her practice at the start of a painting, the models were dismissed when Schjerfbeck’s inventive powers took charge.

A subsequent section presents a sequence of portraits from the 1920s and 1930s. Helene Schjerfbeck rarely noted a sitter’s name in her titles, and it is very likely that she suppressed her sitters’ identities for the same reasons she eschewed mimetic portraiture: in the few instances when she strove to transfer a likeness to canvas, her efforts often frustrated her until she got it right. Many of her sitters sport modish dress, evidence of Schjerfbeck’s lifelong interest in French fashion. After reading a 1912 article in an art magazine, she fell for the paintings of El Greco (1541–1614). Though she had no access to the originals, she worked up rather stylized transcriptions of his Madonnas and other sacred subjects, a preoccupation that intensified during World War II.

In 1894, the Finnish Art Society sent Schjerfbeck to Vienna and Florence to copy works by the painters Holbein, Velázquez, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Giorgione. While in Italy, she painted several ethereal landscapes of Fiesole, perched on a hill above Florence. There, no doubt, she studied the beautiful yet degraded frescoes decorating the city’s churches.

Spanning 50 years of Schjerfbeck’s career, still-life paintings illustrate the artist’s shifting creative language. The Red Apples (1915), unique in her career for its glowing palette, demonstrates the artist’s distinctive technique of layering and removing paint to achieve complex structures. By the 1930s, the artist had reduced her still-life palette to more somber tones, exploiting her fruits to further her surface experiments. In her final still life, painted in 1944, blackening apples metaphorically reference the devastation of World War II and the chaos of upheaval.

Helene Schjerfbeck interrogated her likeness in 40 self-portraits across her lifetime. Her canvases trace the arc of her artistic development as they materialize her physical growth and decline. From youthful expressions in a naturalistic language to facial distortions that anticipate the haunting finale of this series, Schjerfbeck captures her self-image with increasing idiosyncrasy and self-confidence.

In Schjerfbeck’s final years, as war raged throughout Finland, her art dealer persuaded her to relocate to Sweden. From 1944 to her death in 1946, she resided in a hotel in Stockholm. There she painted 20 of her 40 self-portraits. Few other series in the history of modern art articulate mortality with such candor, as the artist used thin, glazed color to produce monochrome representations that are at once haunting and magnificent meditations on the effects of age and illness.

Seeing Silence: The Paintings of Helene Schjerfbeck is curated by Dita Amory, Robert Lehman Curator in Charge of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Met. Anna-Maria von Bonsdorff, director of the Ateneum Art Museum, is the consulting curator.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.

This exhibition was organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with the Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum. The exhibition is made possible by Elsa A. Brule.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Gallery 964

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

Joan Mitchell @ David Zwirner, NYC - 'To define a feeling: Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965' Exhibition Curated by Sarah Roberts

To define a feeling 

Joan Mitchell, 1960–1965 

Curated by Sarah Roberts 

David Zwirner, New York 

November 6 — December 13, 2025 

Joan Mitchell 

Untitled, c. 1963 

© Estate of Joan Mitchell

I’m trying for something more specific than movies of my everyday life: To define a feeling.

—Joan Mitchell in ARTnews, April 1965

David Zwirner presents an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) that focuses on the years 1960 to 1965, a brief but critical juncture in the artist’s development. Capping off a yearlong celebration of the centennial of the artist’s birth, this presentation is curated by Sarah Roberts, senior director of curatorial affairs at the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and brings together a significant group of works from public and private collections, as well as that of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. 

During these years, Joan Mitchell spent many weeks each summer and fall living on a sailboat and exploring the Mediterranean from a home base along France’s Côte d’Azur with her companion, painter Jean Paul Riopelle, and her works from this period are inflected by these voyages and the sites of the Mediterranean. Back in her Parisian studio, Mitchell drew on the experience of looking out at the water, horizon, and rocky coasts, resulting in paintings that depart radically from those of the preceding years, and are distinct from those that would follow. Characterized by dark, central masses of swirling brushstrokes in deep greens and blues partially obscuring rich tonal colors embedded beneath, these turbulent canvases exchange the grounding armature that had structured much of her previous landscape-inspired work for more experimental compositional strategies. Constituting, as the poet John Ashbery described, “an unhurried meditation on bits of landscape and air,” the profound, dramatic works on view offer insight into Mitchell’s distinctive process in evolving the structural and chromatic composition of her paintings, while dynamically engaging many of the key themes and motifs that extend throughout her oeuvre.

As Sarah Roberts notes of the exhibition:

For Joan Mitchell, abstract painting had a singular capacity to capture and communicate multiple layers of human experience—things seen, touched, felt, and remembered—in a single visual field. From 1960 to 1965, her days and nights included frequent Mediterranean sailing trips to Corsica and Italy with her partner Jean Paul Riopelle, time spent reading and discussing poetry with friends, deep thinking about painting, and keenly felt losses of loved ones, as well the assassination of John F. Kennedy and growing social unrest in both the US and France. Reflecting on this tumultuous period later in life, Mitchell named all these events as impacting the direction of her work. Never seeking to create direct representations of particular moments or to simply channel a single emotion or thought, she sought instead to render in paint something new that articulated the sum of experiences in all their complexity and ambiguity—to define a feeling.

The selection of paintings and drawings gathered here shows Mitchell at work from 1960 to 1965, responding to the sea’s expanse and surrounding landscapes, and generating fresh ideas about painting itself. Central masses of densely applied paint in somber tones began to emerge in her canvases in 1960. By 1962, she had narrowed the range of hues to the darkest greens, browns, and blues, colors so deep that this group of works has frequently been referred to as the “black paintings,” though true black was rarely included. Mitchell concentrated her swirling central masses into floating islands of color within subtly varied, off-white fields. Within just two years, she would shift again, opening the concentrations into constellations of loose, squared forms and tangled brushwork as she continually experimented.

Reflecting on recent work in her 1965 oral history with art historian Dorothy Seckler, Mitchell noted, “Clement Greenberg said there never should be a central image, so I decided to make one.” With this body of work, Mitchell also patently challenged prevailing conventions of balanced composition and harmonious color, choosing an enigmatic palette with flashes of sharp contrast, shifting her “central” forms slightly off axis, and playing with backgrounds and corners. Echoes of Mediterranean light and rocky, shrub-studded coastlines were met with the turbulence and toughness in her painting technique, giving rise to one of Mitchell’s most daring, moody, and probing bodies of work.

Highlights from the exhibition include Mandres, c. 1962 (Private Collection, courtesy of McClain Gallery), an important transitional work that shows Mitchell beginning to experiment with central forms; Untitled, 1963 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), an expansive triptych characteristic of Mitchell’s growing engagement with multi-panel works during this period; as well as a selection of small-scale paintings that were inspired by stations on the Paris Metro and debuted in her 1965 solo exhibition at Stable Gallery, New York, including one on loan from the Hofstra University Museum of Art. Also on view are several large-scale paintings from the collection of the Joan Mitchell Foundation that span these years, as well as a grouping of rarely seen works on paper made using charcoal and crayon—sometimes in combination with watercolor—that extend Mitchell’s exploration of form and color in a different medium.

The exhibition is supplemented by a selection of primary materials from the archives of the Joan Mitchell Foundation. A fully illustrated catalogue with new scholarship on this period by Sarah Roberts and other authors is forthcoming from David Zwirner Books.

Artist Joan Mitchell

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) established a singular visual vocabulary over the course of her more than four decade career. While rooted in the conventions of abstraction, Mitchell’s inventive reinterpretation of the traditional figure-ground relationship and synesthetic use of color set her apart from her peers, resulting in intuitively constructed and emotionally charged compositions that alternately conjure individuals, observations, places, and points in time. Her prodigious oeuvre encompasses not only the large-scale abstract canvases for which she is best known, but also smaller paintings, drawings, and prints.

Born in Chicago and educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, from which she received a BFA (1947) and an MFA (1950), Joan Mitchell moved to New York in 1949 and was an active participant in the downtown arts scene. She began splitting her time between Paris and New York in 1955, before moving permanently to France in 1959. In 1968, Joan Mitchell settled in Vétheuil, a small village northwest of Paris, while continuing to exhibit her work throughout the United States and Europe. It was in Vétheuil that she began regularly hosting artists at various stages of their careers, providing space and support to help them develop their art. When Mitchell passed away in 1992, her will specified that a portion of her estate should be used to establish a foundation to directly support visual artists.

In 1951, Joan Mitchell became one of the few female members of the exclusive Eighth Street Club, and, that spring, her work was included in The Ninth Street Exhibition, organized by charter members of The Club with the assistance of Leo Castelli, which helped to codify what became known as the New York School of primarily abstract painters. During her lifetime, Mitchell’s work was exhibited in solo presentations at numerous influential galleries in the United States and Europe, including Stable Gallery, New York (1953, 1955, 1957, 1958, 1961, 1965); Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles (1961); Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris (1967, 1969, 1971, 1976, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1987, 1990, 1992); Martha Jackson Gallery, New York (1968, 1972); Xavier Fourcade, Inc., New York (1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1986); and Robert Miller Gallery, New York (1989, 1991). The Joan Mitchell Foundation was previously represented by Cheim & Read, New York, where the artist’s work was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, in 1997, 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2011, 2014, 2016, and 2018.

Her first institutional solo exhibition, My Five Years in the Country, was held in 1972 at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York. Subsequent museum presentations during Mitchell’s lifetime were held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1974, 1992); Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York (traveled to Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; and La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, California; 1988–1989).

In 2002, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, organized a posthumous retrospective of Mitchell’s work, which traveled to Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; and Des Moines Art Center, Iowa. In 2010, the Joan Mitchell Foundation organized Joan Mitchell in New Orleans, which included a symposium on her life and work, and three concurrent exhibitions held at Tulane University’s Newcomb Art Gallery, New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans. In 2015, Joan Mitchell Retrospective: Her Life and Paintings was presented at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria, and subsequently traveled to Museum Ludwig, Cologne. Additional recent museum solo presentations include those at Kunsthalle Emden, Germany (2008; traveled to Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, Italy and Musée des Impressionnismes, Giverny, France, 2009); Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2010); and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Caen, France (2014). In 2017, Mitchell / Riopelle: Nothing in Moderation opened at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and traveled to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (2018); and Fonds Hélène et Édouard Leclerc, Landerneau, France (2018–2019).

A comprehensive Joan Mitchell traveling retrospective was co-organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The retrospective was first on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2021, before traveling to the Baltimore Museum of Art the following year. The exhibition was subsequently presented at Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, through 2023, where the complementary exhibition, Monet – Mitchell, was also on view. The Saint Louis Art Museum presented an adaptation of Monet – Mitchell in 2023, featuring eight works by Mitchell and two by Monet.

Mitchell’s work can be found in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Anderson Collection at Stanford University, California; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nakanoshima Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, Japan; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC; RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate, United Kingdom; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER

537 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.davidzwirner.com

Joan Semmel @ Jewish Museum, NYC - "Joan Semmel: In the Flesh" Exhibition

Joan Semmel: In the Flesh 

Jewish Museum, New York 

December 12, 2025 — May 31, 2026 

The Jewish Museum in New York presents a major exhibition of boundary-breaking work by Joan Semmel alongside a selection of artist-curated works from the Museum’s collection in Joan Semmel: In the Flesh. For over 50 years, Joan Semmel has upended traditional figuration with her boldly declarative nude painting through gestural and hyperreal representation. In the Flesh juxtaposes 16 paintings by the artist, drawn from several periods across her career, many monumental in scale, with nearly 50 modern and contemporary artworks from the Museum’s expansive holdings. The works from the collection—encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, and works on paper—were selected by the artist for their engagement with themes present in her work, including her exploration of beauty, agency, and self-perception.

The exhibition is organized by Rebecca Shaykin, Barnett & Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art, and Liz Munsell, Curatorial Consultant, in partnership with Joan Semmel.

“As we consider new possibilities for showcasing the Museum’s robust collection, In the Flesh has offered a special opportunity for exploring the range of narratives and stories that radiate from our holdings,” said James S. Snyder, Helen Goldsmith Menschel Director. “Dedicated to and curated in concert with Joan Semmel, In the Flesh highlights the work and insights of an artist who continues to be ahead of her time. The exhibition simultaneously reflects the Museum’s legacy of championing artists who fearlessly share their lived histories and challenge the status quo through their creative practice.”

Born in 1932 into a secular Jewish family in the Bronx, Joan Semmel trained as an Abstract Expressionist in New York before moving to Spain in 1963, where she enjoyed early success on an international stage. Upon her return to New York in 1970 as a newly divorced mother of two, she found community within the burgeoning feminist and anti-censorship movements, alongside her peers, including Judith Bernstein, Louise Bourgeois, Joyce Kozloff, Joan Snyder, Anita Steckel, Hannah Wilke, and other trailblazing women artists. During this period, she also curated two of the earliest exhibitions of contemporary feminist art, giving women artists a public platform denied to them by many mainstream institutions. Over the course of the following decades, Joan Semmel forged a distinct painterly language of nude imagery that was a defiant response to the male gaze and spoke to her own bodily experience as a woman, emphasizing female empowerment and sexual agency. At 93, Semmel remains a master of figuration, continuing to challenge views of female aging and respectability.

In the Flesh foregrounds the artist’s diligent, life-long investigation of embodied female experience. Spanning over 50 years of the artist’s practice, the exhibition offers new points of entry to some of Semmel’s most pivotal series. Works on view include her 1978 painting Sunlight, one of Semmel’s iconic self-images and a defining work of the feminist movement, together with examples from her bold, high-key Erotic Series of the early 1970s, as well as complex multi-figure compositions, including the recent large-scale Skin in the Game (2019).

The kaleidoscopic selection of Semmel’s featured works provides context for artworks from the Museum’s collection by artists including Ida Applebroog, Marc Chagall, Nan Goldin, David Levinthal, Alice Neel, Nancy Spero, Man Ray, Larry Rivers, Laurie Simmons, Joan Snyder, and Hannah Wilke, among others.

“When I arrived at the Jewish Museum 15 years ago, Sunlight immediately emerged as one of my favorite works in the collection. It is thrilling to present this painting within a comprehensive view of the artist’s development as a painter of the female form, and especially of her own body over time, and to be doing so in such close dialogue with the artist herself,” noted Rebecca Shaykin. “Joan Semmel’s paintings challenged the male-dominated art world of the 1970s. Her work has inspired generations of artists and shifted the trajectory of contemporary art history. Her selections from the Museum’s collection demonstrate how influential the feminist movement has been in changing the conversation about whose perspectives we value and why.”

Artist Joan Semmel

Joan Semmel (b.1932) has long centered her practice around representations of the body from the female perspective. Trained as an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s, Joan Semmel began her painting career in Spain and South America. Returning to New York in the early 1970s, she turned toward figurative painting, constructing compositions in response to concerns around female representation in popular culture and in art. Her practice traces the transformation that women’s sexuality has experienced in the last century and emphasizes the possibility for representing female autonomy through the body.

Semmel’s work was the subject of a career retrospective, Skin in the Game, presented by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA in 2021, traveling thereafter to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York in 2022. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Tate, London (2023); the Brooklyn Museum (2016 and 2023); the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs (2020); Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken, Germany (2018); the Jewish Museum, New York (2010 and 2018); the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2013); and the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2008), among others. 

The artist’s paintings are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Jewish Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is Professor Emeritus of Painting at Rutgers University.

Born in the Bronx, New York, and currently based in SoHo, Joan Semmel studied at Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, and the Art Students League of New York.

Anish Kapoor: Early Works is also on view through February 1, 2026 at The Jewish Museum.

JEWISH MUSEUM, NEW YORK

1109 5th Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY 10128

thejewishmuseum.org

Li Songsong @ Pace Gallery, NYC - 'History Painting' Exhibition

Li Songsong: History Painting

Pace Gallery, New York

November 7 - December 20, 2025

Li Songsong 

Revolution, 2025

© Li Songsong, courtesy Pace Gallery

Pace presents History Painting, an exhibition of new paintings by the Beijing-based artist Li Songsong, at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Showcasing a selection of paintings created this year, the presentation spotlights Li’s enduring engagement with history as both inspiration and substance for his work. History Painting is accompanied by an exhibition booklet from Pace Publishing featuring an essay by the gallery’s Curatorial Director, Xin Wang.

One of the most celebrated contemporary painters in China, Li Songsong has honed his distinct style—marked by his use of reliefs, bold brushstrokes, and solid color blocks—over the last 20 years as part of his pursuit “to paint something that had a certain distance from reality,” as he once put it. Contending with history, politics, and culture, Li’s art is forged in enactments of accumulation and subtraction, of exposure and obscuration. At once personal, imaginative, and truthful, his deeply expressionistic paintings often depict fragmented, semi-abstract figurations underpinned by narratives that the viewer is invited to decipher and absorb.

Over the last several decades, the artist has deconstructed and reconstructed recognizable images from newspapers, films, historical photographs, and other media, reinterpreting them through the lens of his own experiences and memories while also creating new textural dimensions within his works. In abstracting images from their original contexts, Li Songsong has cultivated a unique visual language that asks viewers to see the world in new terms—from a different aesthetic perspective.

“History has always been a prime substance, if not subject, throughout Li’s practice, and the artist works with it not as evidence, but as symptom and pathos,” Xin Wang writes in her new text for the artist’s  show. “It is not so jarring, then, that in his recent series explicitly titled History and Past, representational content has given way to the visceral and relational.”

In his presentation with Pace in New York, the artist, who has been represented by the gallery since 2009, shows new paintings from his body of work titled History, which he began in 2023. Entirely abstract, these paintings, all of which are square in format, can be understood as portraits of his ever-evolving relationship to the medium.

“This new group of works has lost its reliance on visual sources,” Li Songsong says. “I simply let the language extracted from (painterly) practice become the protagonist and construct a historical metaphor in the form of ‘painting.’”

Building up his compositions in grids as part of his process, Li Songsong uses color to express his state of mind at the moment the paint meets the surface of his canvases. He sees each of his brushstrokes as agentive and idiosyncratic, indelible and eternal even as they are folded ever deeper into the painterly layers and recesses of his works.

Li Songsong’s paintings animate the fragmentary nature of images and memory, paying particular attention to the people, events, and themes of modern and contemporary Chinese history. Li is interested in the way images cultivate histories and provoke memories, even if their relationship or reference to the past is nebulous and indirect. Although his compositions draw on found imagery—with a range of sources including restaurant advertisements, historical photographs, and movie stills, among others—Li freely reinterprets his sources, altering or omitting visual information. The resulting works eschew narratives, presenting pieces and traces of something rather than a totalizing record, creating new ways of looking at existing information.

PACE

540 West 25th Street, New York City

www.pacegallery.com

Portia Zvavahera @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - 'Zvibereko zvemweya wangu' Exhibition

Portia Zvavahera

Zvibereko zvemweya wangu

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

November 14, 2025 – February 7, 2026

Portia Zvavahera

Takasunungurwa, 2025 

© Portia Zvavahera. Courtesy Stevenson and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, its third solo exhibition with the Zimbabwean artist Portia Zvavahera. Taking place at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles, this presentation features a series of new works that continues to develop Zvavahera’s experiments with different painting processes and subject matter by joining her carefully charted dream worlds with her lived experience and daily rituals. Portia Zvavahera expands her practice with familiar motifs and narratives; her works are populated by symbolic creatures that become powerful conduits for the interpretation of spiritual visions and the contemplation of our earthly existence. 

In her paintings, Portia Zvavahera gives form to emotions beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. Her vivid imagery is rooted in the cornerstones of our earthly existence—life and death, pain and pleasure, isolation and connection, and love and loss. These deeply personal visions are realized through layers of vibrant color and ornate, veil-like patterns that the artist builds up into palimpsestic surfaces through a combination of expressive brushwork and elaborate printmaking techniques. Zvavahera’s compositions draw on particular traditions of figuration in past and present Zimbabwe, first expressed in the work of Thomas Mukarobgwa in the 1960s, while also pointing to postwar artistic practices that probe the nature of the human condition.

Zvavahera’s latest exhibition powerfully continues this exploration of the human condition. Themes of love, loss, fear, family, and protection recur throughout this new series of paintings, mirroring her broader practice. The show title Zvibereko zvemweya wangu loosely translates from Shona as the “fruits of my soul,” aptly describing the intense creative output behind these works. These monumental paintings are among her most energetic to date, deeply inspired by her love for family and, particularly, the passing of her late grandmother. Here, Portia Zvavahera resumes her study of dreamscapes, delving into subject matter that women, especially mothers, have experienced across time. She strips away the protective veneer of modern society, exposing core emotions that relate to the profundity of life and death. Incorporating new motifs like vessels, trees, water lilies, and snakes, Zvavahera’s paintings guide viewers on journeys, telling abstracted stories about the strength within the maternal and matriarchal world, where reality and imagination merge.

Shona is the artist’s native language, which she speaks at home; titles in Shona are provided with a translation only when Portia Zvavahera feels that the English words suffice. Experimenting with batik and block printing, oil sticks, and acrylic paints, Zvavahera's canvases are applied with layers, and then, like dreams, unfold into camouflaged compositions rich in symbolism and psychological depth. Within Zvibereko zvemweya wangu, Portia Zvavahera portrays small figures, children unbound by the canvas and surrounded by protecting arms and feathered veils painted with leaves, using a traditional wax-resist batik method, in works such as Kubuditswa muhari (2025). Others like Kubudiswa (redeemed) (2025) show a series of bowing figures—a community seemingly praying as a form of collective strength, demonstrating their power in numbers.

Artist Portia Zvavahera

Portia Zvavahera was born in 1985 in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she currently lives and works. She studied at the BAT Visual Arts Studio, National Gallery of Zimbabwe, from 2003 to 2005. She then received a diploma in fine arts from Harare Polytechnic in 2006.

Portia Ndakaoneswa murima, the artist’s first solo presentation in New York and her second with the gallery, was on view at David Zwirner, New York, in 2021. Zvavahera’s first exhibition with the gallery, Ndakavata pasi ndikamutswa nekuti anonditsigira, was at its London location in 2020.

The artist has presented several solo exhibitions with Stevenson, Cape Town and Johannesburg (2014–2020), and a solo exhibition with Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles (2017). The National Gallery of Zimbabwe, Harare, presented her solo exhibition Under My Skin in 2010, and in 2020, the Institute of Contemporary Art Indian Ocean, Port Louis, Mauritius, held her solo exhibition Walk of Life. She was invited to show her work as part of the Zimbabwean Pavilion exhibition Dudziro: Interrogating the Visions of Religious Beliefs at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. In 2022, her work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale.

In 2024, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, England, presented Portia Zvakazarurwa, a solo exhibition of the artist’s work organized in collaboration with Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, where the show traveled in 2025. Curated by Tamar Garb, this exhibition marked Zvavahera’s first solo institutional presentation in the United Kingdom. Also in 2024, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, presented Imba yerumbidzo (House of praise), as the fifteenth iteration of its Open Space solo exhibition series. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, opened Hidden Battles / Hondo dzakavanzika, Zvavahera's first institutional solo exhibition in the United States, in August 2025. The artist also opened her first solo institutional exhibition in Germany at Fridericianum, Kassel, on September 27, 2025.

DAVID ZWIRNER LOS ANGELES

616 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

www.davidzwirner.com

Stuart Pearson Wright @ Flowers Gallery Hong Kong - 'Roadkill' Exhibition of Paintings

Stuart Pearson Wright: Roadkill

Flowers Gallery Hong Kong

28 November 2025 – 3 January, 2026

Stuart Pearson Wright

Roadkill, 2024 

Oil and pigmented gesso on Oak 

23 x 14 cm, 9 x 5 1/2 in

© Stuart Pearson Wright, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Stuart Pearson Wright

Claire / Clive, 2023 

Oil and pigmented gesso on Oak 

47 x 36 cm, 18 1/2 x 14 1/8 in

© Stuart Pearson Wright, courtesy of Flowers Gallery

Flowers Gallery Hong Kong announces Roadkill, the first solo exhibition in Asia by acclaimed British painter Stuart Pearson Wright. The exhibition presents a new series of portraits created over the last five years, offering a deeply personal and darkly humorous reflection on one of the most challenging chapters in the artist's life.

 

Best known for his psychologically-charged portraiture, Stuart Pearson Wright uses the language of painting to explore the tension between vulnerability, absurdity, and resilience, featuring the artist's renowned embodiment of rich surfaces and fine detail. In this body of work, anthropomorphism becomes a central device: human figures merge with animal traits, everyday objects, and theatrical exaggerations. These hybrid presences serve as both unsettling and comical stand-ins for the human condition.

Humour functions here not merely as an artistic strategy, but as catharsis—providing an irreverent and playful counterweight to themes of grief, isolation, and fragility, which the artist experienced during recent struggles in his personal life. Through distortion, disguise, and surreal imagery, Stuart Pearson Wright captures the paradoxical ways in which comedy emerges from pain, and how imaginative reinvention can be an act of survival.

“These paintings embrace the ridiculous because sometimes laughter feels like the only way out of despair,” says Stuart Pearson Wright. “By reimagining myself and those around me in animal or hybrid forms, I found a form of honesty that was impossible through realism alone.”

The works continue Wright’s longstanding engagement with the traditions of portraiture, but with an increased sense of theatricality and allegory. Drawing on influences from Renaissance portraiture, British satire, and the absurdism of literature and theatre, the paintings situate themselves in a liminal space between sincerity and parody. 

Stuart Pearson Wright (b. 1975, Northampton, UK) is celebrated for his provocative and technically masterful approach to portraiture. A graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, he has received numerous awards, including the BP Portrait Award in 2001. His works are held in many prestigious collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in London. This exhibition marks his first major presentation in Hong Kong. 

FLOWERS GALLERY HONG KONG

49 Tung Street, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

www.flowersgallery.com

Jane Irish @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - 'An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation' Exhibition

Jane Irish 

An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation 

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia 

October 3 – November 15, 2025 

Jane Irish 

Archimedean Spiral, 2024

Oil on linen with clear gesso ground, 56 x 50 inches

© Jane Irish, courtesy Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Jane Irish (b. 1955). This marks the artist’s tenth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Excavating traumas of war and colonialism and embedding these histories into elaborate architectural settings, Irish’s disorienting scenes are layered with multiple visual narratives. Of this new body of work, the artist says:

“Painting representationally or figuratively can be an act of imagination, but entails a code of truth, especially of the interior… The depictions of colonialism and the luxury items in French chateaus, which are often my subject matters, have an overt or covert connection to world systems of exploitation, including especially French involvement in Indochina...I try to exploit a certain doubleness: a harsh critique coexisting with the optimism of political prefiguration.”

Foregrounded by prefigurative politics—an activist approach to ideating a future society—her work analyzes the roots of Western painting and exposes its violent remnants. Within the title, “An Absolute Reciprocity of Adaptation”, she reinterprets the concept of symbiosis drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s epic poem Eureka. Focusing on a reciprocal adaptation of ideas and mediums, Irish understands how these relations produce a “prefiguration of peace.” Her persistent interest in the cultural memory of the American War in Vietnam reappears in these new works, including references to the anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against The War (VVAW), which the artist has worked with for decades. 

Jane Irish 

Return, 2025 

Oil on linen with clear gesso ground, 55 x 64 inches

© Jane Irish, courtesy Locks Gallery

In a large painting on bamboo paper titled Our Testimony (2025), she embosses the VVAW preamble from a 1971 U.S. Congressional record atop an ornately decorated living room. In another painting titled Agent Orange (2025), Jane Irish calls to mind the pollutant used in herbicidal warfare programs with a muddy, darkened palette, while mutating, floating apparitions haunt the room and her 2021 painting Phosphorous hangs on the wall. Of the painting, Jane Irish says,  “I emphasize the violence in the room’s decor. With a breaking heart I ask, ‘Why wouldn’t we repeat and preserve the abuse and killing since we idolize our lives around these acts?’”

Meta references continue in Return (2025), where she transforms her series of colonial scenes titled Decay Puits Sauvage (2025) into a phantasmic wallpaper. Paintings of the decaying wall are shown alongside the semi-fictionalized setting in Return, signaling a spiral of meaning and “coevolution.” Juxtaposing images of colonial violence with the indigenous Vietnamese cloud flooring, Irish’s room becomes both contemplative and confrontational.

Also on view is a large-scale study for Irish’s Renaissance-style ceiling painting titled Cosmos Beyond Atrocity (2024), which was commissioned for the new building of the Princeton University Art Museum. Mounting the study as a wallpaper and hanging the drawings in front, the installation presents Irish’s adaptive process to illuminate the layered temporalities and spatial collisions.

Artist Jane Irish

Jane Irish (b. 1955) received her MFA in 1980 from Queens College, CUNY. She got her start as an artist in the East Village in the 1980s and moved to Philadelphia in 1982. 

She has exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE; the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, LA; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. 

She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Artist Grant (2025), a BAU Institute Arts Residency Award from the Camargo Foundation (2025), a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Biennial Grant (2024), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2011), a Painters and Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (2009), a Painting Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts (1984), and a Painting Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982). 

Her work is held in public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Princeton University Art Museum, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Pat Steir @ Locks Gallery, Philadelphia - 'Before the Rain' Exhibition

Pat Steir: Before the Rain 

Locks Gallery, Philadelphia

October 3 – November 15, 2025

Pat Steir 

Winter Daylight, 2021-22 

Oil on canvas, 108 x 108 inches

© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery

Locks Gallery presents Before the Rain, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Pat Steir. This marks the artist’s eighth solo show with the Locks Gallery.

A monumental figure in contemporary painting, Pat Steir developed her distinctive style of Waterfall paintings in the 1980s, embedding deep, lyrical meaning in the free expression of paint. Surrendering herself to chance and “non-intention”, Steir’s process of dripping, pouring, and throwing paint marked a defining moment in her exploration of materiality and of the artist’s role in creation, opening a way for her continued mastery of this dance between paint, gravity, gesture and ground.

Steir’s new works find her building upon and refining these guiding variables. Against a darkened ground, as seen in Many Colors II (Blue) (2022) and Winter Daylight (2021-22), dripping multi-colored brushstrokes act as prisms within the encompassing layers of poured paint while precise white lines recall her underlying interest in grids and matrices.

Pat Steir 

Monday Circus, 2022-23

Oil on canvas, 108 x 72 inches

© Pat Steir, courtesy Locks Gallery

In tandem with the darkened palette and hypnotic allure of these paintings, Steir’s nomenclature also entwines itself with a certain poetics, inspiring viewers not just to look but to ruminate. The artist has said, “[T]he poetry of the title is part of the picture for me. It’s absolutely the same thing.” Take Monday Circus (2022-23), where swinging strokes of chartreuse, maroon, and orange conjure a myriad of evocations from playful to melancholic. In her succinct yet nuanced phrases, such as One Green One (2025), Pat Steir incorporates rhythm in the language of her titles that helps instill the image in the “mind’s eye.”  

Artist Pat Steir

Pat Steir (b. 1938) was born in Newark, New Jersey and currently lives and works in New York. 

Throughout her renowned career, she has been the focus of numerous solo museum exhibitions and site-specific installations. 

Pat Steir was the recipient of a Guggenheim Artist’s Fellowship (1981), a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist’s Grant (1973), an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from Pratt Institute (1991) and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Boston University (2001). 

She is a founding board member of Printed Matter, Inc. in New York and the landmark feminist journal, ‘Heresies’. 

Her work is represented in major collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Tate Gallery, London.

LOCKS GALLERY

600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106

www.locksgallery.com

Clare Grill @ Derek Eller Gallery, NYC - 'Parlance' Exhibition - Text by Mark Krotov

Clare Grill: Parlance

Derek Eller Gallery, New York 

October 17 – November 15, 2025

Clare Grill

Flit, 2025 

Oil on linen, 46 x 42 inches

© Clare Grill, courtesy Derek Eller Gallery

Derek Eller Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new paintings by Clare Grill entitled Parlance.

Thick vertical lines hum close to the surface of Flit like folds in a translucent curtain. Toward the top of the painting, a faded orange circle hovers off to the right of a smaller, more emphatic version of the same. A sun and its ghost? A siren and its shadow? Clare Grill’s paintings are, among much else, documents of accretion, profoundly attuned to their own past lives and to the gestures that conveyed the work from there to here. These flickers and remnants of earlier work never disappear into the background—they linger, waiting for Grill to arrange them in pictorial space and activate them in the painting’s hierarchy.

For Grill, the background texture of a painting is as consequential as the marks and shapes that populate the foreground. “I care about the whole thing,” Grill says, down to the edge of the canvas, the corner where its face turns to become its side, which she attends to with her typically unwavering conscientiousness.

As Grill’s paintings evolve over months and sometimes years, she paints Signets, small works on paper that concentrate the most cherished elements of a work just before it’s transformed and repainted. Once Grill embarks on a new painting, she might return to some of these Signets, treating them as clues or leads—“more bits of information to collaborate with,” as she puts it. In this way, Grill’s artistic process itself becomes a key touchstone for her own work alongside other, more interior forms of inspiration.

The beautiful and disarming paintings in Parlance overflow with surprising juxtapositions of color and texture. They encourage infinite chains of association both stubbornly physical (the background of Flit as mesh or gauze, the possibility of a log and a stump in Lop) and mysterious and ethereal (autumn leaves drifting in a puddle, a sudden vision of the sky in Weld that one might confuse for a hole in the canvas). The surprising use of shadow in Flit calls to mind the blocky lettering on a midcentury movie poster, while the diaphanous simultaneity of shape and background in Dune is so enfolding that it can only refer to an emotion or a mood—to something total and all-consuming.

As pleasurable and open as these paintings are, they’re also dense with private references—words, letters, figures that might be words or letters. What registers at first glance as a constellation of stray components quickly coalesces into a parlance at once intimate and detectable to anyone willing to stop and look. Parlance is full of allusions to Grill’s great-grandmother’s shorthand writing, and to her young daughter’s invented “witch language” and her fake cursive, a pattern that possesses the fluid and halting quality of handwriting but isn’t actually writing—not quite. As with the traces of lettering Grill uncovers in antique embroidery samplers, these subterranean forms of writing exude meaning even as they resist definitive interpretation. Much like abstraction itself.

-- Text by Mark Krotov, 2025

Clare Grill (born 1979, lives and works in Queens, NY) received her MFA from the Pratt Institute in 2005 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include Cutwork, Galería Marta Cervera, Madrid, Spain; and Wich Language and Oyster, M+B, Los Angeles, CA.. Group exhibitions include Things I Had No Words For at the Center for the Arts, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Interisland (New Paintings from New York and Hawai'i), University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Of Flesh and Air, Marta Cervera Gallery, Madrid, Spain; The Feminine in Abstract Painting, Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY; Deep! Down! Inside!, Hales Gallery, NY; and New Skin, curated by Jason Stopa, Monica King Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, ArtNews, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Boston Globe. This is her third solo show with Derek Eller Gallery. 

Upcoming Exhibitions at Derek Eller Gallery:

Nancy Shaver, Bus Stop, November 21, 2025 - January 10, 2026

In the North Room: Karl Wirsum, Slideshow: Drawings from the Sixties, November 21, 2025 - January 10, 2026

DEREK ELLER GALLERY

38 Walker Street, New York, NY 10013

www.derekeller.com

Gene Hedge @ Lincoln Glenn Gallery, New York - 'Pieces Of The City' Exhibition

Gene Hedge: Pieces Of The City

Lincoln Glenn Gallery, New York

November 13 – December 20, 2025

Lincoln Glenn Gallery presents Gene Hedge: Pieces of The City, a solo exhibition of the artist’s collages, paintings, and constructions from the 1950s through the 1970s. Hedge’s alternative practices reveal a singular way of seeing the world—an approach that infused his work with depth, dimension, and a quiet sense of reverence for form.

This exhibition marks Lincoln Glenn Gallery’s second presentation of Hedge’s work since the artists passing in 2017. Pieces of The City bring to light a remarkable body of paintings and constructions that remained hidden for decades in his SoHo studio—works that encapsulate both the discipline and devotion of an artist who lived entirely for his craft.

Although Gene Hedge initially found success in the vibrant postwar art world, he ultimately turned away from commercial recognition. By the early 1970s, he had withdrawn from the gallery circuit entirely, devoting himself instead to teaching, travel, and the creative achievements of his peers. Living and working in his SoHo loft on Bleecker Street, Gene Hedge chose a life of solitude and pure artistic pursuit. He painted obsessively, not for sale or acclaim, but for the sake of the work itself—an act of quiet defiance in a market-driven era.

Born and raised in Indiana, Gene Hedge served in the military from 1946 to 1947 and used G.I. Bill tuition assistance to study art at Ball State University. Inspired by the writings of László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), he moved to Chicago in 1949 to attend the Institute of Design, founded as the New Bauhaus by Moholy-Nagy in 1937. After graduating, Gene Hedge relocated to New York in 1956, where he began working industrial paper used in highway construction—transforming the material into organic abstractions that bridge art, nature, and technology.

In 1965, Gene Hedge radically reimagined his process by experimenting with acrylic paint. He poured pigment directly onto canvas, coaxing it into biomorphic shapes with a squeegee to create rhythmic compositions that balance control and chance. These works, often produced in sets, explore infinite variations of a single visual idea—each canvas an intimate meditation on movement, repetition, and restraint.

Hedge’s works are represented in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other major institutions.

Gene Hedge: Pieces Of The City is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Clanci Jo Conover.

LINCOLN GLENN GALLERY

542 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lincolnglenn.com

Teemu Mäenpää @ Helsinki Contemporary - 'Paradise Lost' Exhibition

Teemu Mäenpää: Paradise Lost

Helsinki Contemporary

31 October - 23 November 2025

Teemu Mäenpää

Kahdet Kasvot / Two Faces, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 120 cm x 100 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Teemu Mäenpää, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Teemu Mäenpää

The Apple, Adam, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 160 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Teemu Mäenpää, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Teemu Mäenpää

Kulkijan kukkanen, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 120 cm x 100 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Teemu Mäenpää, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Teemu Mäenpää’s expressive paintings brim with raw energy, vibrant colour, and playful openness. His art grows from the very gesture of painting itself: fluttering palm fronds and elongated petals emerge from the natural arc of his hand. He combines media intuitively – from oils to spray paints – creating works that pulse with immediacy. Mäenpää’s boldly physical, uninhibited approach to painting is rooted in his background in street art, and his practice embodies an attitude that defies the gravitas of high art.

Paradise Lost unveils Mäenpää’s latest works – paintings that dance between abstraction and representation, alive with a rich vocabulary of metaphorical plants and animals. The exhibition’s title evokes a longing for nature and a yearning for a lost Eden. Yet in Mäenpää’s art, plants primarily serve as mirrors of human nature, metaphors for care, connection, society, life, and growth. Each painting, in its own way, is also a vicarious self-portrait.

For Teemu Mäenpää, painting plants is also a form of escapism. His canvases conjure comic strip–like adventures, exotic landscapes, and mythical visions of paradise. A recurring motif from his earlier work also makes a reappearance: the humble houseplant. Perched on windowsills, these vegetal figures gaze outward, existing under human care and separated by glass from the world beyond. Mäenpää’s paintings seem to ask: on which side of the window is paradise truly found – and on which side does our real nature belong?

Teemu Mäenpää

Gogonuts Tree, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 200 cm x 160 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Teemu Mäenpää, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Teemu Mäenpää

Ihastumisen aakkoset / The ABCs of Infatuation, 2025

Acrylic on canvas, 120 cm x 100 cm

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

© Teemu Mäenpää, courtesy Helsinki Contemporary

Teemu Mäenpää (b. 1977) is a Tampere-based artist who graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki in 2008. He has exhibited widely in Finland and abroad, at venues including Galleria Halmetoja, Make Your Mark Gallery, ARTag Gallery, and XXIX Mänttä Art Festival. His works are held in the collections of the Tampere and Turku Art Museums, the Nelimarkka-Foundation, the Saastamoinen Foundation, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, and the Seppo Fränti Collection deposited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma. Mäenpää has also completed several public commissions.

Paradise Lost marks his second solo exhibition at Helsinki Contemporary.

HELSINKI CONTEMPORARY

Bulevardi 10, 00120 Helsinki

helsinkicontemporary.com

Philemona Williamson @ Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco - 'Disproportionate Upheavals' Exhibition of Paintings

Philemona Williamson

Disproportionate Upheavals 

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco

November 1 - December 20, 2025

Philemona Williamson 

Uneven Terrain, 2025

Oil on canvas, 48 x 56 in (121.9 x 142.2 cm)

© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, presents Disproportionate Upheavals, the gallery’s second solo exhibition with narrative painter Philemona Williamson. The presentation includes eight paintings created between 2024 and 2025, along with a significant piece from 2016.

Philemona Williamson, based in New Jersey, is known for her figurative paintings. Williamson’s narratives of childhood and adolescence create a space of fable and memory investigating the dissonance, possibility, and liminal state of transition. With a career spanning over forty years, she creates an iconography both personal and universal.

Figures are dynamic, passionate, volatile, familiar, and strange—moving through moments of uncertainty and landscapes beyond control. Toys and objects act as repositories of emotion and memory. Poetic and open-ended, the paintings invite viewers to tap into their own stories of change, chaos, and possibility. 

Philemona Williamson 

Dwelling in Discord, 2025

Oil on canvas, 36 x 40 in (91.4 x 101.6 cm)

© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery

Dwelling in Discord (2025) interweaves two very different places from her childhood: the upscale Upper East Side NYC apartment where her parents worked and lived, and a small room in a Harlem hotel with a communal kitchen. From a young age, she had to navigate these contrasting worlds. Philemona Williamson affirms that the longing for home, safety, and a sense of belonging in the world never diminishes.

The paintings are visually and technically fluid, with brushstrokes moving through saturated fields of color. The underlying hues in each piece emerge strongly through the figures; ambiguous gestures blur the boundaries between figures and their surroundings. Every plant, animal, object, and landscape feels resonant—as if recalling a half-remembered dream or a return to childhood memories.

Philemona Williamson 

A Crooked Line, 2016 

Oil on canvas, 55 x 80 in (139.7 x 203.2 cm)

© Philemona Williamson, courtesy Jenkins Johnson Gallery

A Crooked Line (2016) was inspired by Williamson’s 2015 artist-in-residence experience at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. She explains, “I would often witness the Second Line parades held for important occasions, both joyful and somber. Here, I conjured that heightened revelry, both public and private, that seems to burst forth when one is free to be their authentic self.”

Philemona Williamson’s (b.1951, New York, NY) work is in institutional collections including: Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Montclair Art Museum, NJ; The Kalamazoo Art Institute, MI; the Sheldon Museum of Art, NE; CNAP: The French National Contemporary Art Collection; and Fondation Francès, Clichy, France. Museum exhibitions include the Queens Museum of Art, NY; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; the Bass Museum, Miami, FL; and Contemporary Art, St. Louis, MO. In 2019, a mid-career survey was held at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey.

Upcoming in 2026: a group exhibition at the Newark Museum and an exhibition curated by Camilo Alvarez, opening in March 2026 at the Mattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT. Her work is currently on view at Fondation Villa Datris, Vaucluse, France. In 2024, Philemona Williamson exhibited in Century: 100 Years of Black Art at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey.

Philemona Williamson is the recipient of numerous awards including Anonymous Was A Woman; Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting; Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; National Endowment for the Arts; and New York Foundation for the Arts. Williamson has taught painting at numerous colleges, including Pratt Institute and Hunter College, New York City, and served on the Advisory Board of the Getty Center for Education in California.

JENKINS JOHNSON GALLERY 

1275 Minnesota Street #200, San Francisco, CA 94107

www.jenkinsjohnsongallery.com