Beautifully Fall Apart

Installation view of After Throwing, featuring works by Yuqian He.

Women constantly fall, from rule, from discourse, from childbirth, from ecstasy, from sacrifice, from love, from anguish. We are still in the place of repeatedly coalescing to regain voice and visibility across political, economic, pedagogical, and creative fields. Comprehending it through cultural theorist and sociologist Angela McRobbie, we see that women are made to bear greater precarity, conditioned by institutions, by discourse, by an economy that asks for passion in place of pay; entering the creative fields comes with a demand to be self-managing, enterprising and unquestioningly cheerful about it. Women might be naturally leading the creative sector but meanwhile, fall heavily onto body, conditions and time, carrying its costs behind the facade of the neoliberal art industry.

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When Pixels Grow Skin

Ziyi Zhang, Installation view of PIXEL//FLESH

Our generation’s idea of “skin” is increasingly formed on screens. Smartphone cameras automatically brighten skin tones, filters smooth pores, and editing software erases wrinkles while manufacturing new forms of gloss and texture. At first, these technologies seemed merely to modify images of the body: skin existed first in the physical world and was then captured and processed by the camera. Gradually, however, this sequence has been reversed. Technologically processed skin has begun to function as a new visual standard, while unedited skin can appear rough, incomplete, or somehow insufficient. It is a subtle shift: the body once entered the image, but now the image increasingly seems to redefine the body.

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This Candy Has Teeth: Can Nostalgia Really Comfort Us?

This Candy Has Teeth, curated by Shuhan Zhang, 2026, image Courtesy of Weicang Wang

Is nostalgia really a safe space for us to process the uncertainty of the rapidly changing present? This Candy Has Teeth, curated by Shuhan Zhang, features five Chinese artists, Shengjie Jiang, Weican Wang, Jiaqi Mao, Yukun (Chloe) Ba, and Cindy (Zhaoyue) Chen, who move through childhood, memory, and nostalgia in different ways. Together, their works reflect our current desire for nostalgia, a desire that perhaps reveals just how uncertain the present feels. Yet the more we try to grasp onto the soft, safe, familiar places of the past, the more complicated those memories become. If you really delve back into them, they are also full of discomfort: moments of being forced to accept what happened, and the stiffness of a choke at the throat. As the curatorial text suggests, it is a “sensory misalignment”—an apple is sweet, yet hard to swallow.

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Pentimento: Danny Balgley at Wexler Gallery

Danny Balgley, installation view, Wexler Gallery, Courtesy of Wexler Gallery, Philadelphia

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.

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Tim Kent’s Sojourn Was Never Actually a Rest

Tim Kent, PASSY, 2026, oil on canvas, 56 x 60 in ( 142.2 x 152.4 см)jpg, photo courtesy of Tim Kent

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.

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Laurie Nye at Uffner & Liu

The liminal space between abstraction and figuration—between the defined and the loose, the restrained and the free—is the terrain of Laurie Nye’s first solo exhibition at Uffner & Liu in New York. In her new paintings, which range from intimate, jewel-like compositions to modestly monumental canvases, Nye proposes that everything we see can be two things at once: a flower and a portal, a tree and a cosmic axis, a landscape and a state of mind.

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Transcendence at FOU Gallery

Group exhibition: Transcendence installation view, 2026. Photography by Jiaqi, courtesy of Fou Gallery

Transcendence, a group exhibition of sculptures and paintings, is curated by Helena Jin and on view at FOU Gallery from July 11 – September 5, 2026. The artists Tianshu Zhang (张天舒), Gloria Fan Duan (樊段晓春), and Tao Xian (陶显) explore the show’s theme of transcendence in vastly different formal ways. Despite Helena Jin’s scholarly background in researching Buddhist art history, the type of transcendence posed by the show is distinctly secular; while some of the artists reference East Asian tradition and symbolism, the “beyond” or spiritual is achieved through individual artistic approaches to color and form.

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Bing Lu: The Queries that Remain After the Image

Bing Lu’s solo exhibition, “what remains after the image,” at Gallery 60 NYC is an endeavor of multifaceted inquiries concerning the nature of photography and image production, abstraction, and the artist’s own personal life. Featuring 13 photographic works that utilize digital collaging and color manipulation techniques, the exhibition is an exercise in experimental spirit for Lu to continually push the boundaries and investigate the abstract and experimental language of photography.

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Extreme Whether Show at Icebox4

Featured Exhibition
Installation view

With only a few days left before it closes on October 4, Extreme Whether Show at Icebox4 offers a gathering of 21 artists responding to the turbulence of the present. Curated by Tom Fitzgibbon, the exhibition unfolds less as a single argument than as a shifting field of voices, unsettled, layered, and in dialogue.

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The Golden Thread, Part 2

Featured Exhibition
Sylvia Schwartz, A Room With A Light

As a textile artist, I am drawn to works that uphold the tradition of fibers vis a vis labor, technique, material, craftsmanship and innovation. In this presentation put forth by Bravin Lee Programs, The Golden Thread 2 displays fiber-themed works taking various forms. Filling the old seaport building from floor to ceiling, room after room reveals different interpretations on what constitutes a “textile” work.

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