Contemporary Art and Culture
The abstract paintings in Pentimento, the debut solo exhibition at Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia by New York artist Danny Balgley, live up to their title. Like geological strata, the urban palimpsest of peeling billboards and weathered facades, or memory itself, their layers let traces of earlier marks show through, revealing themselves gradually, the longer we look.
Taiwanese visual artist Yu-Hsu Chou uses photography to ask: how much can we trust what we see? This question runs through all his images, whether landscape, digital signals, urban surfaces, or human shadow. However varied the subject matter is, each work evokes the gap between what is visible and what we believe it to be.
Orly Cogan stitches, crochets, and paints directly onto photographs. Under her needle, figures loosen from their frames, and in some pieces the thread spills past the edge onto the floor. Her work on photographs owes much to twenty years alongside the photography dealer Robert Mann. The two met at an art fair, reconnected at a collector’s party, and had their first date in her studio talking about her work; across years of openings, fairs, and long studio hours since, each has shaped how the other looks. Cogan, trained as a painter, came to read a photograph as an object with its own history and materiality, while Mann, whose gallery was built on photography, became an advocate for embroidery and its feminist history. That shared education first reached his gallery walls in 2014.
Behind the Lens and Through the Needle gathers the work that grew from that exchange and opens Mann’s newly built West Chelsea space in his thirty-fifth year with a public gallery. In Cogan’s hands, the two mediums hold different kinds of time: the camera’s caught instant and the needle’s slow, cumulative one. The photograph gives her the frozen scene; the embroidery reopens it, adding labor, touch, and imagination until the captured moment seems to keep unfolding.
Sojourn, a new body of work by Canadian-American painter Tim Kent, opened recently at Hollis Taggart’s Chelsea location runs through October 17. Ask Kent what the show is about. He gives you a clean, simple answer. The main idea is just taking a break from working too hard. It’s the kind of respite that chronically overworked New Yorkers rarely give themselves.
In Kent’s telling, rest isn’t relaxation. It’s rebellion.
Joyce Polance has spent three years painting the same therapist nineteen times, in oil with fingers, and always from photographs taken at the close of a session. Polance inverts a familiar asymmetry: in therapy, Polance is the one exposed and observed, and here the therapist is the subject of long study, a figure whose features have grown more familiar to Polance yet, in many ways, remain a stranger. That paradox drives this body of work and gives the exhibition its title, The Patient Looks Back. It opened this September at Vassar College’s James W. Palmer III Gallery. What began as a single painting became something more persistent: a reflection on how difficult it is to truly know another person, even under the closest attention.
The opening of AMEN : NEMMEN, Vince Briffa’s installation on faith and belief, fell on the first rain of the year, closing out a hundred-and-twenty-day drought and the first completely dry Maltese summer in six years. I had not yet met the island’s infamous heat, and on September 14th, as if the island had been holding its breath, the grip finally let go. The narrow stone bridge into Fort St Elmo and the Chapel of St Anne, the exhibition’s site, act as a conduit through time, folding centuries and space into a single, intimate passage of entry. Fort St Elmo’s honey-hued limestone stood monumental, solemn, and unbothered in the late-summer light, the kind of backdrop that makes an installation about faith feel almost inevitable.
Beyond the Sky is an immersive, large-scale video installation projected at Art Cake through Monday, September 21st. The story behind it begins and ends with a spirit of collaboration—with the tragic note of the Red Hook fire in between. Simona Prives, the visual artist behind the project, shares her collaborative journey, beginning with her work alongside Kyle Luntz and Ryan Vahey.
Memory is a fickle thing. However, when viewed through a neuroscientific lens, memory is also a biological process. Serena Scapagnini’s artistic practice, her recent Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante (2026) in particular, explores the retrieval of memory in its interdisciplinary entirety. Inaugurated on June 4th as a permanent installation at the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University, Saliency, La Memoria Cangiante opens a wider reflection on the position of memory, whether as process or personal attachment, in Scapagnini’s work and current projects.
