Alexandre Diop @ Stephen Friedman Gallery, London - "Run For Your Life !" Exhibition

Alexandre Diop

Run For Your Life !

Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

19 September - 1 November 2025

Alexandre Diop

A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal, 2025

© Alexandre Diop, courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

Stephen Friedman Gallery presents Run For Your Life !, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Franco-Senegalese artist ALEXANDRE DIOP. This marks the artist's debut show with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in London.

Alexandre Diop’s powerful mixed-media works explore themes of history, metaphorical archaeology and socio-political change, with this body of work focusing on the relationship between movement and time, represented by dance or migration. The title of the exhibition, Run For Your Life !, is an invitation to stand for change, show tolerance, and be alert to crises around the world. Diop’s practice is interdisciplinary; his experience as a dancer, musician, and visual artist allows him to create artworks that transcend traditional paintings.

Physicality is central to the artist’s process. Diop’s rigorous approach to his work—which he refers to as object-images—combines found and recycled materials such as scrap metal, wood, leather, and textile remnants with classical techniques like oil painting. The materials are sourced from scrapyards, urban streets and derelict buildings, and then transformed through an intensive process of layering, burning, tearing, stapling and collaging onto wood panels. His material language, while firmly rooted in personal and political narratives, also engages with multiple art-historical lineages. His work draws from movements such as Dada, Art Brut, Expressionism and the Viennese Secession, while maintaining a strong dialogue with both West African aesthetic traditions and the visual codes of contemporary urban culture.

Alexandre Diop’s practice is anchored in drawing. He combines calligraphic strokes, symbols, and layered images that are painted, drawn, or sprayed. Figures— both human and animal—emerge from textured surfaces that blur the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and relief. Their stance recalls the awareness of a dancer, attuned to the body’s own rhythms. In this sense, the works look inward: they stage a dialogue between movement and stillness, surface and depth, becoming mirrors through which viewers may glimpse fragments of their own inner reality.

At the same time, Alexandre Diop’s work confronts the world beyond the self. It reflects on how individuals are bound by external forces—systems of illegality, oppression, and exclusion. In A Vos marques ! Prêt ! Illegal, 2025, a central figure cries out yet remains unheard, embodying the suffocation of life within unjust structures. The work echoes the story of Jesse Owens, the African-American runner who won Olympic gold in 1936 under Nazi rule, and becomes a call for freedom, justice, and resilience against overwhelming odds. Alexandre Diop constructs new worlds where historical, political, and social narratives unfold, offering his figures a space to resist, endure, and reimagine history.

Artist Alexandre Diop

Alexandre Diop is a Franco-Senegalese artist whose powerful, mixed-media works interrogate themes of ancestry, beauty, violence and social transformation. Drawing upon his experience as a dancer, musician, and visual artist, Alexandre Diop brings a multidisciplinary lens to his practice, crafting works that are deeply visceral and formally innovative. Alexandre Diop was born in Paris, France in 1995. He lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

Alexandre Diop’s work has been the subject of major solo museum exhibitions. In 2023, his work was presented with 18th century anatomical wax models of bodies and body parts in Anatomie at Josephinum Medical Museum, Vienna, Austria. His residency at the Rubell Museum in Miami culminated in a touring exhibition, Jooba Jubba, l’Art du Défi, the Art of Challenge, shown in Miami (2022) and Washington DC (2023). In 2022, Alexandre Diop exhibited alongside Kehinde Wiley in La Prochaine Fois, Le Feu, presented by Reiffers Art Initiatives in Paris.

Notable group exhibitions include Les Apparitions, Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France (2025); De Sculptura, Albertina Klosterneuburg, Klosterneuburg, Austria (2025); The Beauty of Diversity, Albertina Modern, Vienna, Austria (2024); Being Mortal, Dom Museum, Vienna, Austria (2023); The New African Portraiture, Shariat Collections, Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria (2022); and Le Mouton Noir, Gesso Art Space, Vienna, Austria (2021).

Alexandre Diop’s works can be found in the collections of Albertina Museum, Vienna, Austria; AMA Venezia, Venice, Italy; AMOCA, Cardiff, Wales, UK; Espacio Tacuarí, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Josephinum Medical Museum, Vienna, Austria; Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau, Austria; MB Collection, Germany; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington DC, USA; Reiffers Art Initiatives, Paris, France; Rubell Museum, Miami, Florida and Washington DC, USA; Ståhl Collection, Norrköping, Sweden; Stora Wäsby Public Collection, Stockholm, Sweden and The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, Florida, USA.

STEPHAN FRIEDMAN GALLERY LONDON

5-6 Cork Street, London W1S 3LQ 

www.stephenfriedman.com

Emma Luukkala @ HAM Gallery - Helsinki Art Museum - "Night Wash" Exhibition

Emma Luukkala: Night Wash

HAM Gallery, Helsinki 

20 September - 9 November 2025

Emma Luukkala

Night Wash, 2025 (detail)

Photo: Emma Luukkala

In her HAM gallery exhibition, EMMA LUUKKALA ponders the overlap between the sacred and the everyday. Life flows in endless piles of things and to-do lists, with moments of meaning, intense in their brightness, at the heart of the chaos.

Jobs I’ve done today: swept the floors, folded the laundry, and moved things from place to place. From somewhere, I can hear a blackbird singing.

Not even the grandest and most solemn situations are pure and uncontaminated by the outside world – they are always adorned with everyday chores and annoying dirt. Emma Luukkala asks what sacred could mean in a new materialist context, where the world is not divided dualistically into the superior spiritual and the inferior material, but instead consists of a wide range of intertwined players.

EMMA LUUKKALA (b. 1992) is a Helsinki-based artist who uses painting materials in a variety of ways, combining flat blocks of colour with relief details. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from Helsinki Academy of Fine Arts in 2020. In recent years, her work has been exhibited at venues including Jyväskylä Art Museum, Kunsthalle Helsinki, tm•gallery and Galerie Anhava.

HAM GALLERY - HELSINKI ART MUSEUM

Eteläinen Rautatiekatu 8, 00100 Helsinki

www.hamhelsinki.fi

Yuan Fang @ Skarstedt Gallery, NYC - "Spaying" Exhibition

Yuan Fang: Spaying

Skarstedt Gallery, New York

September 4 – October 25, 2025

Skarstedt Chelsea presents Spaying, Yuan Fang’s second solo exhibition with the gallery (the previous one was in London). In this deeply personal and formally rigorous body of work, Yuan Fang turns inward, offering a meditation on illness, identity, and the intricate architecture of womanhood. In addition to her large-scale canvases, Yuan Fang debuts a suite of smaller, more intimate paintings—what the artist refers to as “subplots,” fragments of a larger, lived narrative.

The exhibition’s title alludes to the medical and emotional ramifications of Fang’s recent breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent treatments, functioning as a reference not only to the potential biological consequences of her treatment, but also the literal act of cutting—a gesture central to her process. Through cycles of modification, layering, and erasure, Yuan Fang pares down each composition until a dominant “entity” emerges. These central forms, always abstract yet bodily, function as torsos, anchoring each painting with a visceral sense of presence. “I need my paintings to be confrontational,” Yuan Fang notes, and indeed, each image carries that charge, meeting the viewer with both the emotional weight of her experience and a visual strength that builds like a storm on the horizon. 

New to this body of work is Fang’s embrace of negative space. Informed by the tradition of “leaving blank” in Chinese painting, these compositional voids focus the viewer’s attention on what remains. Separately, the rhythm of her studio practice has slowed, inviting longer periods of contemplation and greater attention to detail. The resulting compositions feel more deliberate with each painting charged with quiet intensity.

Autobiographical threads run throughout. Several works incorporate the artist’s own medical imaging subtly embedded in the compositions, such as Accumulating, Breaking Through the Defense Line. Others channel the psychic toll of external expectation and all of the rage, pressure, and fatigue that accompany it. 

Throughout the show, Yuan Fang navigates the porous boundaries between vulnerability and strength, life and death. This emotional duality is echoed in the palette of deep burgundies, forest greens, and indigos, and in the evocative titles of works such as Standing, Injured Horse and Bloody Meteorite Falling from the Sky. In the ease of her oil transitions and the fluidity of her lines, there is a quiet but profound sense of release. The works in Spaying may emerge from pain, but they insist on clarity. Though anchored in personal experience, Spaying broadens Fang’s ongoing investigation into the construction of feminine identity and the quiet rebellions required to reclaim it. Confronting her own mortality has yielded a new lucidity, and with it, a sharpened resolve to live on her own terms.

SKARSTEDT NEW YORK CHELSEA

547 West 25th New York, NY 10001

www.skarstedt.com

Ana Cláudia Almeida @ Stephen Friedman Gallery, NYC - "Over Again" Exhibition

Ana Cláudia Almeida: Over Again

Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York

5 September - 18 October 2025

Ana Cláudia Almeida

Licking, 2025

© Ana Cláudia Almeida, courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York, presents Over Again, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by Brooklyn-based, Brazilian artist ANA CLAUDIA ALMEIDA. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in New York.

Ana Cláudia Almeida is an artist whose work explores materiality through movement and mark-making, incorporating a range of media including paper, plastic, oil pastels, paint, video, and sculpture. Her practice seeks to disrupt the functional role of objects by examining the dynamic tension between interior and exterior, individual and environment. The fluttering nature of her works on fabric, the shifting quality of her sculptures, and the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of her large-scale paintings transform intangible memories into physical form.

In Over Again, drawing, oil painting, sculpture, and plastic collide in what Ana Cláudia Almeida describes as an “ecosystem of pieces,” where each medium leaks into the next—a monotype that wants to be a drawing, a drawing that yearns to be a painting, and plastic remnants that refuse to be cast aside. Processes coexist and collide across surfaces, embodying the changeability that sustains both life and artistic practice. Her work reflects the cyclical nature and plasticity of life, tracing the ways in which every action leaves an imprint that shapes what comes next.

Ana Cláudia Almeida’s new body of work—and the exhibition’s title—draws inspiration from Brazilian musician Tim Maia’s song Over Again, which she embraces as a mantra urging liberation from rigid patterns in mind, body, and daily life. Literature, music like Maia’s, and the people she’s met have opened her to alternative ways of living, offering a vision of a less harsh existence. “Precisely in the moments when everything felt more urgent than fabulation, allowing myself that exercise was one of the greatest experiences of freedom I could have had… and now my new pleasure is to lean into the place that hope occupies in the lives of us, Black people.”

In works like Cascata II (2025), Ana Cláudia Almeida revisits the notion of freedom—inseparable, for her, from hope. The largest work in the exhibition is composed of vividly painted fabric that cascades from the gallery ceiling. Its free-flowing brushstrokes unfurl in winding swaths of color, a stunning display of the artist’s intuitive process. This sense of unrestrained movement extends throughout the exhibition: in Dew (gripe) and Belly full of liquids (both 2025), Almeida uses expanses of white space to frame and amplify her vibrant, expressive line drawings. 

For Over Again, Ana Cláudia Almeida assembles a constellation of works that speak to difference, resilience, and the radical act of imagining otherwise. Together, they form what she calls “an essay for a world of differences and complexities”—a defiant refusal of the “machine of existence-flattening” and an invitation to inhabit a space where freedom and hope are lived, shared possibilities.

Artist Ana Cláudia Almeida

Ana Cláudia Almeida (b. 1993, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; lives in Brooklyn, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and video. Her work has been exhibited widely in Brazil and internationally. Notable presentations include a two-person exhibition with Tadáskía at the Nevada Museum of Art as part of the Joyner/Giuffrida Visiting Artists Programme; Guandu Paraguaçu Piraquara at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Rio de Janeiro; Buracos, Crateras e Abraços at Quadra, Rio de Janeiro; and Wasapindorama at Fundação de Arte de Niterói, Niterói. Group exhibitions include Ensaios sobre a Paisagem at Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho; Olhe bem as montanhas at Quadra, São Paulo; Essas Pessoas na Sala de Jantar at Casa Museu Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro; Crônicas Cariocas at Museu de Arte do Rio; and Casa Carioca at Museu de Arte do Rio.

Ana Cláudia Almeida holds a BFA from Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. 

Her work is held in the public collections of Museu de Arte do Rio, Instituto Inhotim, Sesc Rio de Janeiro, and the Nevada Museum of Art.

STEPHEN FRIEDMAN GALLERY NEW YORK

54 Franklin Street, New York 10013

www.stephenfriedman.com

John Zurier @ Peter Blum Gallery, NYC - "Pink Dust" Exhibition

John Zurier: Pink Dust

Peter Blum Gallery, New York

September 2 – November 1, 2025

Peter Blum Gallery presents Pink Dust, an exhibition of new works by Berkeley and Reykjavík -based artist, JOHN ZURIER. This marks the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery.

John Zurier's exhibition Pink Dust features a body of work created over the past two years predominantly in Iceland. This group of smaller paintings and one large painting emerged from his time at a farmhouse at the base of a mountain with views of fields, the sea, and a glacier in the distance, deeply influencing his artistic practice. The works revisit and expand upon the abstract formal language Zurier developed after his initial visit to Iceland in 2002.

The exhibition title and the largest painting’s title, A History of Pink Dust, are taken from Ron Padgett's book of poems entitled, Pink Dust. They symbolize the tangible residue of the creative process—the erasures, revisions, and diligent effort in both poetry and painting. It speaks to accumulation and condensation, highlighting the complexity and time required to achieve simplicity.

Many of these paintings were created at a farm known for its persistent winds. John Zurier embraces this constant presence, viewing it as a pervasive form of breathing that moves through everything. He aims to cultivate stillness within this dynamic environment, striving for what he calls a silent, moving stillness that moves through the paintings themselves. Over the last two years, his focus has been on achieving greater density in the paintings, imbuing the atmosphere with more weight and making the light feel more substantial.

John Zurier's artistic exploration has led him deeper into the monochrome, which he perceives as a realm of infinite possibility. As color narrows—grays that hold traces of blue or green, whites that carry the memory of yellow— every delicate shift is amplified, encouraging a different mode of perception. Working with colors in lower registers and contrasts demands heightened attention. The paintings encourage viewers to slow down and engage with them over time, resisting quick interpretations and asserting their own temporal rhythms.

While some paintings possess the fluid immediacy of open skies, many surfaces are more distressed and worked. John Zurier employs techniques of scraping, wiping, building up, and tearing down, allowing the paint to accumulate the history of these actions. This creates a quality akin to weathering, mirroring how the Icelandic landscape bears the marks of time. Each surface functions as a field that can be simultaneously disrupted and continued, with marks creating their own logic and rhythm—what Zurier likens to the painting's breathing.

What John Zurier seeks is atmosphere as material itself. The unique, quiet diffusion of Iceland's air inspires him to have the paintings contain this quality. The slow light in Iceland fosters patience, building gradually and shifting imperceptibly with sudden shifts. Working in this light, Zurier has learned to trust the process over deliberate decisions, with paintings emerging from gradual layering.

These recent paintings demand more time to complete due to their layered complexity, requiring periods of dormancy between sessions, and thus holding a temporal density that reflects the desired atmospheric density within the work. Much like air holds moisture or light slows through water, these paintings embody a greater accumulation of time.

This working method has transformed Zurier's perception. His eye has adapted to subtlety, discerning micro-variations within apparent sameness. Stillness, for John Zurier, is not the absence of movement, but movement so concentrated it becomes its own form of rest. In these paintings, he strives to make this paradox visible—surfaces that vibrate with accumulated energy, yet offer profound quiet to those who spend time with them.

JOHN ZURIER (b. 1956, Santa Monica, CA) lives and works in Berkeley, CA and Reykjavík, Iceland. He earned an MFA at the University of California, Berkeley (1984). Instititutional exhibitions include Currier Museum, Manchester, NH (forthcoming 2026); Scheider Art Museum, Ashland, OR (forthcoming 2025); High Museum, Atlanta, GA (2025); The National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík (2023); Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, CA (2023, 2018, 2014); Stavanger Art Museum, Stavanger, Norway (2023); Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden (2021); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2017); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM (2016); Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME (2015). He has exhibited at the 30th São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2012); California Biennial, Orange County Museum of Art, CA (2010); 7th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2008); Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, England (2003); and the Whitney Biennial, NY (2002). He received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2010).

PETER BLUM GALLERY

176 Grand Street, New York, NY 10013

www.peterblumgallery.com

Guimi You @ Lehmann Maupin, NYC - "Breath, Island" Exhibition

Guimi You

Breath, Island

Lehmann Maupin, New York

September 4 – October 18, 2025

Lehmann Maupin presents Breath, Island, a solo exhibition of new paintings by South Korean artist GUIMI YOU. Inspired by her recent solitary two-week journey to Korea’s Jeju Island, the works in this exhibition trace both the contours of the island’s volcanic terrain and the artist’s own inner landscapes. Through delicate, atmospheric brushwork and a sensibility rooted in East Asian painting traditions, Guimi You transforms Jeju’s flower-filled hillsides, lush botanic gardens, and quiet guest houses into intimate spaces of reflection and self-discovery. Breath, Island follows You’s inclusion in a number of recent institutional exhibitions, including those at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, Florida.

Jeju Island, often described as Korea’s island of wind, stone, and women, holds a unique place in Korean cultural collective memory as both a natural sanctuary and nostalgic retreat. For Guimi You, its landscapes are both subject and mirror. Wandering its oreum (volcanic hills), resting beside ponds framed by blooming magnolia, or watching waterfalls carve their paths through black basalt, You allowed the rhythms of the island to shape her own: breath following landscape, painting following breath. Over time, her awareness surpassed the environment, reaching into the very experience of being alive.

Originally trained in East Asian painting, You’s understanding of East Asian pictorial traditions—where painting is not an act of depiction, but of evocation—anchors her approach. Her mark-making recalls the layered transparency of ink washes and the restrained harmony of traditional Korean landscapes, reminiscent of works like Jeong Seon’s Inwangjesaekdo, which capture not only form but atmosphere. Brushstrokes hover like mist, yet settle like memory.

At the same time, You’s years spent in the United Kingdom and United States imbued her practice with the materiality of oil painting and the structural dynamics of Western contemporary art. Her works exist between Eastern and Western legacies, and she approaches them through a lens of synthesis rather than negotiation. In her paintings, oil behaves like ink, and forms emerge with the lightness of thought. In balancing these disparate traditions, You’s paintings enter personal terrain—a space where East and West, past and present, landscape and self gently coalesce.

In Breath, Island, the act of painting is both record and refuge. Works such as Noble Silence (2025) depict the interior of the artist’s wooden guest house: a silent space that holds the sacred stillness of artistic solitude. Elsewhere, Rest (2025) captures figures lingering in a garden at the foot of Mt. Halla; here, human presence dissolves into landscape. In Pause (2025), a simple view of bonsai framed by a greenhouse window becomes a meditation on growth and restraint. Across the exhibition, traces of the artist herself—suggested silhouettes, personal objects, a figure mid-sketch—weave quietly throughout the scenes.

Breath, Island is less a chronicle of Jeju than a portrait of a painter in search of equilibrium. For GuimiYou, painting is not a destination, but a passage: a way of translating identity into image and holding two worlds, East and West, within the same frame. In this sense, her paintings function as islands themselves—floating spaces where the memories of one place and the lessons of another can meet, pause, and breathe.

LEHMANN MAUPIN NEW YORK

501 West 24th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.lehmannmaupin.com

Austin Martin White @ Petzel Gallery, NYC - "Tracing Delusionships" Exhibition

Austin Martin White

Tracing Delusionships

Petzel Gallery, New York

September 4 – October 18, 2025

Petzel presents Tracing Delusionships, an exhibition of new largescale paintings and works on paper by Philadelphia-based artist Austin Martin White. The show marks White’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition corresponds with the release of Austin Martin White’s first monograph. 

Austin Martin White draws on various references to excavate the ways in which history can be bent, reassembled, or hallucinated. Among the most ambitious in scale White has completed to date, the artist debuts a new series which interprets etchings by 18th century Italian architect, artist, and archaeologist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, who fused real monuments and fictive views from antiquity. White probes the inspirational potential of a collapsed, classical past, summarized by Piranesi’s concept of “speaking ruins”: a description for architecture that conjures a world beyond its remains.

Interested in how these images traffic through time as empires decline and global powers shift, Austin Martin White warps, stretches, and splices Piranesi’s reproductions, investigating ruins as arbiters of historical memory. Crumbling arches and labyrinthine stairways, once etched in ink, are fractured and extruded by White through his signature process. Drawing from archival sources, he translates imagery into digital drawings, laser-cuts vinyl stencils, and pushes latex paint through mesh screens from behind. He renders his “Ruins” in maze-like, snaking estuaries of paint. Surfaces appear ridged and vascular, as if oozing from a primordial core.

Monumental in scale, these paintings conjure visions of fantastical follies—structures made not for function but for wonder—while also signaling scenes of industrial collapse or cities devastated by war. Saturating the present yet overlapping with centuries past, White’s images of wreckage become sites of projected anguish, longing, delusion, and desire.

Austin Martin White also turns to the legacy of Bob Thompson, an artist who reimagined the formal and conceptual boundaries of classical painting. Through his “After Thompson” works, White references La Mort des Enfants de Bethel (1964/1965), Thompson’s gouache rendering of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents. White distorts Thompson’s composition further, reframing the plight of the innocents in a present tense. Figures appear ghost-like, as if excreted from the surface, and landscapes buzz with volatile, chromatic intensity—an afterlife of an image that resists repose.

Returning to artists like Thompson and Piranesi, Austin Martin White explores how both destabilize their sources—sometimes reverently, sometimes destructively. White embraces the fragment, sitting in the tension between structure and breakdown, past and present, image and aftermath.

Artist Austin Martin White

Austin Martin White (b. 1984, Detroit, Michigan) is an artist living and working in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and earned an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College.

Working with a variety of mediums including rubber, acrylic, spray-paint, vinyl, 3m reflective fabric and screen mesh mediums, White creates paintings and works on paper that investigate representations of historical memory, drawing on archival research that addresses issues of identity, race and postcolonialism.

White’s work has appeared in numerous publications including Artforum, Texte zur Kunst, Flash Art, 032c and The Observer, among others.

Austin Martin White was included in the group exhibition Overflow, Afterglow: New Work in Chromatic Figuration at the Jewish Museum, New York in 2024, marking his first institutional presentation. Austin Martin White had his first solo exhibition at Petzel’s Upper East Side location.

PETZEL GALLERY

520 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

www.petzel.com

Eckart Hahn: Silence @ Pablo’s Birthday, New York

Eckart Hahn: Silence 

Pablo’s Birthday, New York

September 5 – October 10, 2025

Pablo’s Birthday presents Silence, an exhibition by German painter ECKART HAHN. After two decades of collaboration, this is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. Hahn’s practice combines elements of narrative and physical tension to explore paradoxical relationships and power dynamics, such as freedom/control, authenticity/artificiality, or isolation/connection. Through the representation of materiality, pressure, gravity, and restriction, he creates a synergy of form and semantics that aid in exploring these binaries. 

“Sight is effortless; sight requires spatial distance; sight can be turned off.”   

– Susan Sontag

Closed eyes link the cast of characters that Eckart Hahn brings to life; apes meditating with apples balanced on their heads and bullets between their toes, while Kermit raises up a skull, and a bird perches on a tower of stacked stones. The profile of a parrot faces us with its eyelids closed. In these contemplative poses, the gesture of looking away evokes both inner stillness and emotional retreat, while the precariousness of balanced objects becomes a metaphor for weight, gravity, strain. In these visual cues, Eckart Hahn uncovers a deeper psychological tension: the burden of moral ambiguity and the delicate negotiation between personal preservation and collective responsibility.

Susan Sontag writes, “In a modern life–a life in which there is a superfluity of things to which we are invited to pay attention–it seems normal to turn away from images that simply make us feel bad.” Susan Sontag emphasizes the human reaction to a constant carousel of thoughts displayed through the everyday, unceasing newsreel. Hahn unveils this tension: When does self-care become neglect? When does self-care shield us not only from harm but from responsibility, connection, and empathy? In reverse, when does a lack of self-care contribute to a deadening of feeling resulting in cynicism or apathy? 

In Hahn’s paintings, we see both a coping mechanism and disengagement, a focus on the self and a shutting out from the world. Hahn raises the question of whether, in shielding ourselves, we risk severing the very qualities that make us human. But Hahn doesn’t offer resolution; rather, he sustains contradiction. He asks us to sit with it, to feel its pull, and its discomfort. 

ECKART HAHN (b. 1971) attended Eberhardt Karl University and the Johannes Gutenberg School in Stuttgart. His works have been represented in solo and group institutional exhibitions and are featured in numerous collections worldwide. Accompanying the publication of his monograph, "Der schwarze Hund trägt bunt" 2018, were three museum exhibitions at Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin; Neue Galerie Gladbeck, Gladbeck; and Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden. In summer 2025, Eckart Hahn presents a retrospective of over 50 works at the Museum Villa Zanders, Bergisch Gladbach, Germany. He currently lives and works near Stuttgart, Germany.

PABLO'S BIRTHDAY

105 Hudson Street, # 410, New York, NY 10013

pablosbirthday.com

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen @ Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC - A Landmark Exhibition

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC

Through January 3, 2027 

Portrait of Adam Pendleton

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Matthew Septimus 

Adam Pendleton 

WE ARE NOT (Composition), 2024 

Silkscreen ink and black gesso on canvas 

19 x 15 in. (43.3 x 38.1 cm) 

© Adam Pendleton. Photo: Andy Romer

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden presents “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen,” a landmark exhibition by Adam Pendleton. The artist presents new and recent paintings as well as a single-channel video work. Pendleton’s first solo exhibition in Washington, DC, highlights his unique contributions to contemporary American painting while making use of the architecture of the Museum and the history of the National Mall.

“Introducing Adam Pendleton’s recent work in our 50th year is intentional,” said Hirshhorn Director Melissa Chiu. “His exhibition reflects the Hirshhorn’s mission as a 21st-century art museum that amplifies the voices of artists responding to history and place in real time. ‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ invites our almost one million annual visitors to think about the complexities of abstraction within the American experience, and its potential to forge associations among our shared past, present and future.”

“I am delighted to exhibit my work on the occasion of the Hirshhorn’s 50th anniversary,” said Adam Pendleton. “It presents a meaningful opportunity to engage, in subtle and poetic ways, with the Museum’s architecture, position on the National Mall and legacy of showing significant abstract and conceptual work.”

Adam Pendleton is known for his visually distinct and conceptually rigorous paintings that he begins on paper with drips, splatters, sprays, geometric shapes, words and phrases, and inky fragments reminiscent of broken letters. These visual experiments are at times carefully controlled and at others freely improvised. He photographs these initial compositions and then layers them using a screen-printing process, purposefully blurring the distinctions between the act of painting, the act of drawing and the act of photography.

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” features Adam Pendleton’s “Black Dada,” “Days,” “WE ARE NOT,” and new “Composition” and “Movement” paintings. An encounter with any of these works, typically composed of two colors on black-gessoed grounds, brings forth the immediacy of gestural abstraction, the considered execution of minimal and conceptual art, and the playfulness of concrete poetry. “Painting is as much an act of performance as it is an act of translation and transformation,” the artist has stated.

The artist also debuts “Resurrection City Revisited (Who Owns Geometry Anyway?),” a new video work that is projected floor to ceiling. The work makes use of still and moving images of Resurrection City, the multiday encampment erected on the National Mall in the spring and summer of 1968, which is considered to be the culmination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign. Strobing in and out of darkness, the documentary material is interspersed with found footage and punctuated by flashes of geometric forms, dissolving the boundaries between abstraction and representation. The film’s score, by multi-instrumentalist composer Hahn Rowe, integrates a reading by the late poet and cultural critic Amiri Baraka with an orchestration of brass, woodwinds and drums.

In its totality, “Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” offers a powerful counterpoint to the Museum’s collection surveys that are concurrently presented in adjacent galleries. The exhibition is organized by Evelyn C. Hankins, the Hirshhorn’s head curator, with support from former curatorial assistant Alice Phan. “It is an honor to invite Adam Pendleton to respond to the Hirshhorn’s singular architecture and location,” said Hankins. “‘Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen’ speaks to the vision of our anniversary—a period of simultaneous reflection and forward thinking, a space in which Pendleton has been operating for almost two decades.”

“Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen” is accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with scholarly essays, Studio Hirshhorn and Hirshhorn Eye videos, and free public programs.

Artist Adam Pendleton

Adam Pendleton (b. 1984, Richmond, Virginia) is a central figure among a cross-generational group of painters redefining the medium as it relates to process and abstraction. In 2024, he was honored with the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

His work has been shown at major museums around the world. Recent solo and group exhibitions include “Adam Pendleton: Blackness, White, and Light,” at mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2023–2024); “Adam Pendleton: To Divide By,” at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri (2023–2024); “Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept,” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2022); “Adam Pendleton: These Things We’ve Done Together,” at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada (2022); and “Adam Pendleton: Who Is Queen?,” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–2022).

Pendleton’s work is part of numerous public collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; and Tate London.

HIRSHHORN MUSEUM

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

Independence Ave SW and 7th St SW, Washington, DC 20560

hirshhorn.si.edu

Adam Pendleton: Love, Queen

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC

April 4, 2025 - January 3, 2027

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson @ The Met, NYC - Largest-Ever Exhibition of Works by American Artist John Wilson

Witnessing Humanity 

The Art of John Wilson 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

September 20, 2025 – February 8, 2026

John Wilson (American, 1922–2015)

My Brother, 1942 

Oil on panel, 12 x 10 5/8 in. (30.48 x 26.9875 cm) 

Smith College Museum of Art, Purchased, (SC 1943.4.1) 

Courtesy of the Estate of John Wilson

The Metropolitan Museum of Art will present Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson, the largest exhibition of this artist’s work and his first solo museum show in New York. For over six decades, American artist JOHN WILSON (1922–2015) made powerful and poetic works that reflected his life as a Black American artist and his ongoing quest for racial, social, and economic justice. His art responded to the turbulent times in which he lived, with a focus on such subjects as racial violence, labor, the writings of Richard Wright, the Civil Rights Movement, and street scenes, and also captured intimate images of family life, with a particular focus on fatherhood. Drawing from the collections of The Met, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and a dozen other lenders, this exhibition features over 100 artworks made over the course of Wilson’s career, including paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture, as well as illustrations for children’s books and archival material; many of the works have not been shown before. The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA).

“While the powerful impact of John Wilson’s art and the enduring relevance of the themes he explored are undeniable, he has not yet received the recognition his work so deeply deserves,” said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer of The Met. “This landmark exhibition honors Wilson’s extraordinary artistic achievements—illuminating the incredible range of work he produced over five decades—and affirms his place in art history as one of the foremost artists devoted to social justice and portraying the experiences of Black Americans.”

Jennifer Farrell, exhibition co-curator and Jordan Schnitzer Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met, said, “Wilson’s art is imbued with compassion and empathy while conveying his anger and distress at the wrenching effects of disenfranchisement, racism, and economic inequality. Challenging deep-seated prejudices and omissions within our national history, Wilson centered the experiences of Black Americans to create images that convey strength, resilience, and humanity. Deeply personal yet widely resonant, his work continues to offer a powerful lens through which to consider today’s urgent dialogues about race, equality, and representation.”

Leslie King Hammond, exhibition co-curator and art historian, professor emerita, and founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art, said, “John Wilson was an artist of profound resilience and passion for the innate essence of dignity, beauty, and humanity of Black Americans, which he witnessed in families, community, and all humankind. He was intentional and relentless throughout his life to create imagery that demanded respect for the Black body in an America struggling with its contested legacy of slavery.”

Working in a figurative style, John Wilson sought to portray what he called “a universal humanity.” While still a teenager, he was struck by the absence of positive representations of Black Americans and their experiences in both museums and popular culture. To counter such prejudices and omissions, Wilson put the experiences of Black Americans at the center of his work and created images that portrayed dignity and strength.

The exhibition begins with work John Wilson made while in art school in Boston, where his subjects included the horrors of Nazi Germany and American racial violence, as well as portraits of his family and neighborhood. It continues through his time in Paris, Mexico City, and New York, capturing the humanity and scope of Wilson’s art. The exhibition concludes with Wilson’s return to Boston and his focus on portraiture. Included are maquettes and works on paper for two of Wilson’s most celebrated works—his sculpture of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the United States Capitol and the monumental sculpture Eternal Presence.

Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson is co-curated by Jennifer Farrell, Jordan Schnitzer Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints at The Met; Leslie King Hammond, art historian, professor emerita, and founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at Maryland Institute College of Art; Patrick Murphy, the MFA’s Lia and William Poorvu Curator of Prints and Drawings; and Edward Saywell, the MFA’s Chair of Prints and Drawings.

The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue, jointly authored and edited by the MFA and The Met, and produced by MFA Publications. Reproductions of artworks and photographs accompany critical essays and personal reflections, including analyses by art historians, interviews with Wilson’s peers, remembrances from fellow Black creatives, and a full chronology by the late artist’s gallerist.

THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

The Met Fifth Avenue, Galleries 691–693

1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028

www.metmuseum.org

Lauren Quin @ Pace Gallery

Pace Gallery represents Lauren Quin

Portrait of Lauren Quin

Photograph by Lee Thompson

Lauren Quin 

Lowing, 2024 

© Lauren Quin, courtesy Pace Gallery

Photo by Marten Elder

Pace announces its representation of the Los Angeles-based artist LAUREN QUIN, who is known for her expansive, vibrant abstractions in which she orchestrates layers of colors, patterns, and symbols to describe, deconstruct, and interrogate the entanglement of real and pictorial space. Quin’s repertoire of dynamic movements and noncompositional forms create pulsating networks of marks and countermarks, which churn and fluctuate between the concrete and the ephemeral. 

Often working at large scale, Lauren Quin constructs her paintings methodically from an arsenal of recurring gestures and techniques. Expressionistic brushstrokes are truncated by channels carved across a painting’s surface, creating sculpted fissures in images that Lauren Quin further disrupts through passages of monoprinted ink, which she weaves between layers of paint. Turbulent and engrossing, her works are as much excavated as they are made. Past and present mingle on the surfaces of her canvases, interrupting and distorting one another.

Drawing is an essential part of Quin’s process. Rather than a compositional map, drawing serves as a compass, a tool for orienteering. In her work, painting is revealed as a wilderness—the act of painting involves the risk of getting lost, of giving up the notion of fixity in space and language. Amidst this painterly derive, Lauren Quin deploys and re-deploys symbols from her ever-expanding archive of drawings, anchoring her process and linking one painting to the next.

The poetic substrate of Quin’s abstraction is temporality. In each work, Lauren Quin interrogates the unfolding of painterly time while also producing an altogether different kind of time. “You can span time inside a painting because when you look at it, you don’t read it left to right; you start to enter, circle, and travel,” Lauren Quin has said. “It takes a long time for a painting to unfold.”

Quin’s representation by Pace follows her New York solo debut in 2024 at 125 Newbury, a project space helmed by Pace Founder and Chairman Arne Glimcher. Entitled Lauren Quin: Logopanic, the exhibition was presented in two parts, bringing together a new body of work. In the 125 Newbury Free Press, Arne Glimcher wrote that Quin’s paintings “knocked me out by their power, intensity, and ravishing beauty … They were overwhelming, like storms harnessed at the moment of exquisite danger.”

Lauren Quin’s first solo exhibition with Pace will open in Los Angeles in February 2026. Her work will be featured prominently in the gallery’s booth at the upcoming edition of Frieze Seoul in September. 

Artist Lauren Quin

 

Born in Los Angeles in 1992, Lauren Quin received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to her 2024 exhibition at 125 Newbury in New York, the artist has presented solo shows at the Pond Society in Shanghai and Blum & Poe in Los Angeles in recent years. In 2023, she mounted her first US museum exhibition, 'My Hellmouth', at the Nerman Museum of Art in Overland Park, Kansas.

Lauren Quin’s paintings are included in major museums collections internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Pérez Art Museum and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and the Long Museum and Yuz Museum, Shanghai. 

PACE GALLERY

www.pacegallery.com

Josh Smith @ David Zwirner, Los Angeles - "Destiny" Exhibition of new paintings

Josh Smith: Destiny

David Zwirner, Los Angeles

September 13 – November 1, 2025

Josh Smith

Find Me, 2025

© Josh Smith. Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner

David Zwirner presents Destiny, an exhibition of new paintings by JOSH SMITH, on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. This is Josh Smith’s first solo presentation in Los Angeles.

For Destiny, Josh Smith has made a series of paintings that continue his long-running dialogue with the grim reaper, a figure that has appeared in his work for years in countless guises. In these new canvases, the reaper is set loose in New York City, riding a bicycle through familiar streets, cutting past landmarks like the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The once faceless symbol of death now has eyes and stares back at you, tangled in the swirl of the city. It is funny, unsettling, and alive.

Smith’s paintings are built out of seemingly contradictory parts: loose but controlled, casual but deliberate, improvised yet tightly bound. He uses the bikes almost like scaffolding. Wheels, frames, and spokes break up the surface and give him an excuse to push color and shape across the support. The reapers wear cloaks made from bold strokes of black, but also from sharp hits of high-tone green, violet, or electric orange. Each canvas is a balancing act where lines threaten to collapse but never do.

There is a real sense of watching a painter solve problems in real time. Josh Smith allows the work to remain in a state of flux. Marks overlap, collide, and seem to rearrange themselves. It is this willingness to keep things open and unsettled that gives the paintings their energy. Even as they embrace a sense of improvisation, the paintings are held together by a deep understanding of how images work and how paint moves.

In these works, the grim reaper is not just a joke or a dark emblem. He becomes a vehicle for Josh Smith to explore the formal and conceptual terrain that drives him as a painter: tension and release, composition and collapse, figure and ground. The humor of portraying death speeding through Manhattan traffic does not diminish the force of the paintings. It sharpens it. The works are graphic and immediate, but also dense, layered, and full of small surprises—lines veer off and double back; colors press against each other in unexpected ways; forms fracture and then reassemble.

Made with this show in mind, the paintings in Destiny are clear about their own pleasures: color, form, and a bit of absurdity, pushed right up to the surface without fear.

The result is a series that feels both pointed and off-the-cuff, tough but playful. These are paintings that believe in themselves even as they undercut their own seriousness. They channel the spirit of the New York School—not as a style but as a way of working that values conviction, quick thinking, and the thrill of watching it all come together on the canvas.

Artist Josh Smith

Josh Smith was born in 1976 in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up primarily in East Tennessee. His work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions at museums and arts institutions in the United States and abroad. In 2024, a solo presentation of Smith’s work, Life Drawing, was shown at The Drawing Center, New York. Other recent solo shows include those held at the Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany (2016); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma, Rome (2015); Zabludowicz Collection, London (2013); The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2011); Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva (2009); De Hallen Haarlem, The Netherlands (2009–2010); Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2008); and SculptureCenter, New York (2004).

Josh Smith’s work has also been included in important group exhibitions, such as Forever Young – 10 Years Museum Brandhorst, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2019–2020); Trouble in Paradise: Collection Rattan Chadha, Kunsthal Rotterdam (2019); Publishing as an Artistic Toolbox: 1989–2017, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2017–2018); Painting 2.0: Expression in the Information Age, Museum Brandhorst, Munich (2015–2016), and Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna (2016); The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World, The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2014–2015); The Painting Factory: Abstraction After Warhol, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2012); ILLUMInations, 54th Venice Biennale (2011); and The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, New Museum, New York (2009).

The artist has been represented by David Zwirner since 2017, and his first exhibition, Emo Jungle, took place at the gallery’s 519, 525, and 533 West 19th Street locations in New York in 2019. David Zwirner Online presented High As Fuck, the artist’s second solo show with David Zwirner in 2020. Also in 2020, a solo exhibition of new paintings was presented concurrently at the gallery’s locations in London and 69th Street in New York. In 2023, a solo presentation of the artist's work was on view at David Zwirner, Paris.

Josh Smith’s work is held in numerous international public collections including The Broad, Los Angeles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

DAVID ZWIRNER LOS ANGELES

606 N Western Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90004 

www.davidzwirner.com

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

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

Stephen Pace 

A Lifetime in Paint

Dowling Walsh Gallery, Rockland

August 1 - 30, 2025

Stephen Pace

A Lifetime in Paint

Oils and Watercolors 1948-2004

Essay by Carl Little

Dowling Walsh Gallery, 2025

© The Estate of Stephen Pace

© Courtesy of Dowling Walsh Gallery

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

www.dowlingwalsh.com

Emily Kam Kngwarray @ Tate Modern, London

Emily Kam Kngwarray 

Tate Modern, London

10 July 2025 – 11 January 2026

Emily Kam Kngwarray 

near Mparntwe  / Alice Springs in 1980

Photograph © Toly Sawenko

Tate Modern presents Europe’s first major solo exhibition dedicated to one of the most extraordinary figures in international contemporary art, Emily Kam Kngwarray (c.1914-1996). A senior Anmatyerr woman from the Sandover region in the Northern Territory of Australia, Kngwarray translated her ceremonial and spiritual engagement with her ancestral Country, Alhalker, into vivid batik textiles and monumental acrylic paintings on canvas. Taking up painting in her 70s and devoting her final years to creating a large body of art, Emily Kam Kngwarray forged a path for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, women artists and Australian artists, and continues to entice audiences around the world three decades after her passing. Organised in collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia, this extensive survey brings together over 80 works from across her extraordinary career. Showing many pieces outside Australia for the first time, the exhibition offers European audiences a once in a lifetime chance to experience Kngwarray’s powerful batiks, paintings and vibrant legacy.

Emily Kam Kngwarray began experimenting with new art media at Utopia Station in the 1970s. After learning the technique of making batik, in the late 1980s she transitioned to painting in acrylic on canvas. Her practice was shaped by her intimate knowledge of her Country and by her role in women’s ceremonial traditions of ‘awely’, which encompass song, dance and the painting on bodies with ground ochres. She sat on the ground when she painted, much in the same way she would sit to prepare food, dig yams from the earth, tell stories by drawing on the sand or ‘paint up’ for awely ceremonies. Her deeply personal approach to painting was developed in isolation from the European and North American artistic practices of her time. This exhibition presents Kngwarray’s work through the lens of her own world, showcasing her as a matriarch of her community, storyteller, singer, visual artist, and custodian of Country.

Encapsulating the ecology of her homeland, Kngwarray’s work features motifs derived from native plants, animals and natural forms. She regularly depicted the pencil yam (anwerlarr) and its edible underground tuber and seedpods (kam), after which she is named, as well as the emu (ankerr), reflecting the animal’s significance to Aboriginal Peoples. The exhibition opens with three acrylic paintings acquired for Tate’s collection in 2019 - Untitled (Alhalker) 1989, Ntang 1990, and Untitled 1990 - featuring densely layered fields of dots representing native seeds. These are accompanied by Awely 1989, inspired by designs women paint on each other’s bodies before performing awely. Two of Kngwarray’s early batiks join Emu Woman 1988, her first ever work on canvas that attracted widespread national attention. These introductory rooms trace the evolution of the artist’s visual language, grounded in her detailed knowledge of the desert ecosystems of Alhalker.

Works from the early phase of Kngwarray’s painting career are shown alongside a striking display of batiks on silk and cotton that hang from floor to ceiling and immerse visitors in the artist’s vivid evocations of her Country. These works are often rooted in the Dreaming (Altyerr), the eternal life force that created the land and its myriad living forms and defined the social and cultural practices of people. Ntang Dreaming 1989 depicts the edible seeds of the woollybutt grass (alyatywereng), while Ankerr (emu) 1989 maps a path of emu footprints travelling between water sources. Larger canvases, including the three-metre Kam 1991, demonstrate how Emily Kam Kngwarray began working on monumental paintings and employing a brighter colour palette.

At the heart of the exhibition is The Alhalker Suite 1993, one of Kngwarray’s most ambitious works on loan from the National Gallery of Australia. Produced at the height of her painting career, it offers a vibrant portrait of Alhalker Country across 22 canvases. Revealing Kngwarray’s broadened colour spectrum and techniques, bright pastel pinks and blues evoke the wildflowers which carpet the landscape after rainfall, and collections of merging dots represent the rockfaces and grasslands of Alhalker. The artist did not impose any limitations for the configuration of the panels, so a new way of seeing her land is possible each time the work is displayed- an ongoing reminder that the stories and places she painted are very much alive.

In her final years, Emily Kam Kngwarray made an abrupt stylistic change, creating a suite of works comprising bold parallel monochrome lines in her familiar palette of reds and yellows, painted on white paper or canvas. Tate Modern presents Untitled (Awely) 1994, a six-panel work originally shown as the centerpiece of the Australian Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale. The evident tactile quality with which Emily Kam Kngwarray applied the paint evokes the gesture and intimacy of painting on the body for awely ceremonies. Moving away from lines and dots during this late period, Kngwarray developed gestural paintings with fluid brushstrokes that burst with energy. Closing the exhibition, Yam Awely 1995 with its intricately painted twists of white, yellow and red intertwined with linear markings of grasses, yams, roots and tracks signifies the timeless connection between Emily Kam Kngwarray and her Country.

Exhibition organised by Tate Modern and the National Gallery of Australia based on an exhibition curated by Kelli Cole, Warumungu and Luritja peoples and Hetti Perkins, Arrernte and Kalkadoon peoples.

Curated by Kelli Cole, Director of Curatorial & Engagement, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Gallery of Australia project, with Kimberley Moulton, Adjunct Curator, Indigenous Art, Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational; Charmaine Toh, Senior Curator, International Art, Tate Modern; Genevieve Barton, Assistant Curator, International Art, Tate Modern and Hannah Gorlizki, Exhibitions Assistant, Tate Modern.

Following its presentation at Tate Modern, the exhibition will tour to Fondation Opale, Switzerland in a new iteration developed in collaboration with curator Kelli Cole.

TATE MODERN

Bankside, London SE1 9TG

www.tate.org.uk

Gabrielle Graessle @ Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena - "True Romance" Exhibition

Gabrielle Graessle: True Romance 

Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena 

July 26 – August 30, 2025 

Gabrielle Graessle

24 hours of daytona ferrari, 2024 

Acrylic glitter and spray on canvas 

50.50h x 140.50w x 1.25d in 

128.27h x 356.87w x 3.18d cm

© Gabrielle Graessle, courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery

Simchowitz presents True Romance, a solo exhibition of new large-scale paintings by Swiss artist Gabrielle Graessle, at Hill House, Pasadena. 

Gabrielle Graessle lives and works in a small village in southern Spain, where her creative practice is deeply entwined with her daily life—her home, her studio, her dogs, and her inner world. Her paintings reflect this porous relationship between self and setting. Her home is not a retreat from the world, but a stage upon which her distinctive visual language comes to life. Often working across multiple larger-scale canvases at once, Gabrielle Graessle constructs her compositions through layers of memory and imagination. She doesn’t aim for literal depiction but seeks instead an emotional truth: a vivid evocation of the energy, glamour, and strangeness that memories can hold.

In True Romance, a series of automobiles takes center stage—sleek, stylized, and brimming with narrative. The works trace back to a childhood memory of her father’s best friend, Hans G., a flamboyant figure who drove a Mini Cooper for everyday use and a Ferrari and Lamborghini for everything else. Though the exact models have faded from memory, the impression remains. The cars are icons—not just of luxury, but of a time, a place, and a masculine mythos that shaped her early understanding of adulthood.

This memory unfolds into another: her father’s annual pilgrimages to the Geneva Auto Salon, returning home with stacks of glossy catalogs and previews of the year’s newest models. Gabrielle Graessle absorbed the visual culture that surrounded these events—the polished chrome, the theatrical presentation, the women in miniskirts with rehearsed smiles. Her painting Salon de Genève sans hôtesse, for example, critically and playfully reimagines these scenes by omitting the ubiquitous “hostess,” calling attention to the spectacle and its gendered constructions. 

Gabrielle Graessle’s interest in pop-cultural iconography—particularly cars like the Ford GT 40 and Ferrari Daytona—places her work in conversation with Pop Art’s fascination with consumer spectacle. But unlike Warhol’s mechanical detachment, Graessle’s paintings retain a hand-drawn urgency and personal resonance. Her use of acrylic, glitter, spray paint, and exaggerated proportions suggests a blend of Pop’s visual vernacular with the raw, instinctive energy of Art Brut and outsider traditions. 

While her subject matter is rooted in both pop culture and personal history, Gabrielle Graessle’s deeper project is an exploration of raw, intuitive expression—unfiltered by academic theory or aesthetic polish. There is a childlike (but never childish) spontaneity in her work: a deliberate return to freedom, where conventional rules dissolve. This spirit is echoed in her materials and occasional text, applied in ways that are both purposeful and instinctive. Vivid colors dominate, not to seduce, but to assert. Her canvases are expansive, immersing the viewer in a world that is at once intimate and strikingly universal. Each work feels less like a standalone image and more like a piece of a larger constellation—a story unfolding in nonlinear fragments. Viewers are encouraged to bring their own memories, projections, and associations into the work. Interpretation becomes a shared act, echoing the layered, open-ended nature of her compositions: ambiguous, playful, and charged with possibility.

True Romance captures the texture of a life filtered through decades of image-making. These are not documents of reality, but of feeling—records of what lingers rather than what occurred. The result is a world both strange and familiar, painted not from observation, but from what refuses to be forgotten.

SIMCHOWITZ HILL HOUSE

Pasadena, CA 91104

Visit by appointment

www.simchowitz.com

Douglas Knesse @ Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena - "Harvest under the sun" Exhibition

Douglas Knesse 

Harvest under the sun 

Simchowitz Gallery, Pasadena

July 26 – August 30, 2025

Douglas Knesse 

I think I saw a paradise, 2024 

Oil stick and acrylic painting on truck tarp. 

74h x 62w x 1.25d in / 187.96h x 157.48w x 3.18d cm

© Douglas Knesse, courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery 

Simchowitz presents Harvest under the sun, Douglas Knesse’s first solo exhibition at Hill House, Pasadena.

Harvest under the sun is a meditative exploration of discipline, devotion, and transformation. For Douglas Knesse, who lives and works in a coastal city along Brazil’s Atlantic Forest, painting is more than expression—it is a quiet, enduring practice and a form of spiritual communication. “Painting has always been a way for me to communicate what words could not reach,” he says. “It is in this quiet space that I connect with the spiritual field, accessing the divine to give thanks, to lay down my fears, to ask, and to speak new paths into existence.”

Knesse’s layered compositions resist finality. Built through repetition and reflection, they evolve, bearing traces of previous gestures. Working across acrylic, oil stick, spray paint, and pastel, he balances vibrant color and organic forms with generous use of negative space. Many works are painted on truck tarps—surfaces marked by use and history—which bring a grounded, corporeal quality to the paintings and deepen their relationship to labor, weathering, and renewal.

His imagery—leaf forms, rhythmic notations, and transient blooms—draws from the natural world but also points inward, toward an interior field of spiritual attunement. In works like TINHA UMA PALMEIRA NA PAISAGEM I, and the cloud drew my strength, this tension between external landscape and internal transformation becomes palpable.

Knesse’s practice resonates with multiple currents in art history. The gestural immediacy of his mark-making evokes Abstract Expressionism, while his use of modest materials and nontraditional supports—particularly in works like Window to paradise and Eruption and garden flowers—recalls the poetic materiality of Arte Povera. At the same time, his quiet emphasis on presence, perception, and process aligns him with Brazilian Neo-Concrete artists, whose works foregrounded sensorial experience and personal transformation.

Though rooted in a specific ecology, the exhibition speaks broadly to cycles of effort and emergence. Each piece carries the memory of what came before and the potential of what may come next. These works honor unseen labor: the slow accumulation of energy, gesture, and faith that precede visible change. Rather than seeking resolution, Douglas Knesse creates space for uncertainty, stillness, and spiritual inquiry. In this way, Harvest under the sun offers more than paintings—it provides a patient, reverent record of becoming.

SIMCHOWITZ HILL HOUSE

Pasadena, CA 91104

Visit by appointment

www.simchowitz.com