Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in September 2025

Highlights

Maren Less, The Black Goat, Acrylic On Linen, image courtesy of Gross McCleaf Gallery

This autumn in the Philadelphia area, we are spotlighting three painting exhibitions which explore intricate connections between people, places, memories, and dreams. In Passing Through. at Gross McCleaf Gallery, Maren Less creates vibrant paintings that blend human and animal forms into unexpected, symbolic narratives. At Arcadia University, Hiro Sakaguchi’s Landscapes of a Restless Mind is a collection of muted neon paintings with intricate line work in which daydreams and global issues swirl together. Finally, in Los De Aqui, Henry Morales’ solo show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia, offers a tender look at everyday life, using unified colors, collected soil, and newspaper clippings to emphasize the deep bond between people and their places. Check out these lively shows exploring empathy and the human experience through three distinctive styles and voices.

Passing Through. at Gross McCleaf Gallery @grossmccleaf
On view through: October 18, 2025
Featuring: Maren Less

*Passing Through.* Installation shot, image courtesy of Gross McCleaf Gallery

In her first solo show, Passing Through. at Gross McCleaf Gallery, Maren Less grapples with liminal dream spaces and “the strange, magical, and often tender terrain between the inner and outer worlds.” In her sensitive yet bold paintings, the distinctions between the human and the natural world intertwine, their shapes dissolving into rhythmic patterns. Iconographic images of cars, buildings, and animals are chaotically jigsawed into otherworldly and magical narratives.

Less’s paintings emulate the feeling of collages made with cut paper. However, thick paint is often piled into each shape, giving them a rich dimensionality and unexpected texture. You can see the trails of her brush meandering through the pools of pigment, creating subtle ripples. She contrasts images of the serene with the violent, the quiet with the chaotic, and the individual with the horde. There are several paintings of airplanes in the process of crashing, with passengers parachuting downwards—sometimes to blessedly safe locations, and at other times, to extremely dangerous alligator-filled locales.

After she completes her paintings, Less further explores each through an original poem, presented in her accompanying catalogue. These poems read as fablesque explorations of universal experiences with dark humor, gentle advice, and fanciful rhymes. So fall into her bright colors, dense shapes, and whimsical words because

Today, life feels chaotic.
But, the windmill keeps on turning
And that feels hypnotic

Landscapes of a Restless Mind at Arcadia University’s Spruance Gallery @arcadiaexhibitions
On view through: December 14, 2025
Featuring: Hiro Sakaguchi
Guest Curator: Cynthia H. Veloric, PhD

Hiro Sakaguchi, *Babel,* Watercolor and ink on paper, courtesy of the artist

Landscapes of a Restless Mind is Hiro Sakaguchi’s solo exhibition, made up of wall-sized canvases and smaller mixed-media drawings on paper. Large or small, his works have a graphic charm with an intuitive and fresh feel, reminiscent of the joy of daydreaming. He draws on a lifetime of experience: childhood visits to the Natural History Museum, his immigration from Japan to Pennsylvania in the 1990s, and his sensitivity to the world’s complexities as he raises his daughter. Sakaguchi swirls together images of machinery, animals, toys, buildings, and landscapes to create surprising and often surreal set pieces where a thousand and one narratives intersect.

Creating playful worlds which often have serious overtones, Sakaguchi references war, industrialization, natural disasters, and global warming. He constructs with illustrative lines and vibrant acrylic washes, using dark humor to emphasize human civilization’s vulnerability to its own hubris and ambition. One of the large canvases is a fantastical homage to David Casper Frederick’s The Sea of Ice (a classic romantic painting reflecting on man’s insignificance in relation to nature). Sakaguchi’s reinterpretation of this epic landscape features a space shuttle, a nuclear plant, and other signifiers of man’s achievements being crushed upon the ice or sucked up into space in a rainbowed vortex.

Sakaguchi creates other pieces with a more optimnistic subtext, including topics like travel, family, and hopeful visions of the future. On a cliff above a busy city barraged with natural disasters, a solitary father and child clasp hands and look upon a technological Tower of Babel. There is a tenderness to the pair in a scene of madness, and a moment of hope as you notice a quaint cabin upon the grass atop the tower. Though these paintings are bustling with complicated imagery, we are drawn into tiny vignettes and intimate groupings of objects and characters. The longer you look, the more potential stories you consider.

Los De Aquí at Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia @tsa_philly
On View Through: October 18, 2025
Featuring: Henry Morales

Henry Morales, *You Got Games On Your Phone?*, Dirt from outside his cousin’s apt. In California mixed with acrylic, course pumice, and oil paint, and newspaper articles on canvas, 20”X26” image courtesy of the gallery

Henry Morales brings emotional resonance and intimate connections to the forefront in his paintings, focusing on scenes of everyday life and family. Each canvas features a purposely-constricted color palette of soft greens, red-browns, purples, and blues. Using acrylic paint, Morales builds color worlds with a grainy texture that makes each image feel like an old photograph, adding a sense of familiarity and nostalgia. His harmonizing hues accentuate the idea that the people within the paintings cannot be disconnected from the space and time in which they live; they are a part of their environments. The edge of each canvas is collaged with newspaper articles, referencing the undeniable force of current events on everyday life.

Morales also visibly incorporates soil from the locations where his subjects live into his paint for both aesthetic and symbolic effect. There is emotional power in his elevation of quiet, banal moments of friendship and connection, from friends drinking together, to parents cooking in a narrow kitchen with their young daughter playing peekaboo (seemingly with the photographer/artist). These paintings do not shy away from breaking the fourth wall, emphasizing the artist’s presence in the room and highlighting his use of snapshots as source materials.

The show’s title Los De Aqui, meaning “ones from here,” becomes a powerful declaration of “presence and connection.” Morales explains he is “[r]eclaiming the phrase Ni de aquí, ni de allá—’neither from here, nor there,”’ as people are from both their country of origin and their country of residence. He tenderly depicts domestic scenes, grounding his family members in time and space where they are able to thrive in their shared sense of community.

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About the writer: Claire Haik is a Philadelphia artist and educator whose work explores the hidden processes of nature. Using oil, acrylic, and hand-crushed, locally sourced pigments, she creates abstracted representations of landscapes and scientifically inspired imagery. Her work has been featured in SciArt in America and Issues in Science and Technology, and she was awarded the Lois and Charles X Carlson Landscape Residency and Experience Economies: Landscape Experience residency at Mildred’s Lane. Haik holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts and studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Pulse Miami and at galleries throughout the Northeast. She currently teaches painting at Wayne Art Center outside Philadelphia. See her art and learn more about her here.