Exhibitions – Page 6

July 3, 2025July 1, 2025

The Time It Takes to Look: Jaqueline Cedar’s Art of the Almost Seen

Jaqueline Cedar, *Dusk*, 2024, acrylic on panel, 10”x8”

At Andrew Rafacz, Jaqueline Cedar’s Slide delivers small paintings with big temporal ambition. In her first Chicago solo show, the artist captures time not as a line but a loop—blurred, fragmented, and thick with atmosphere. Figures flicker in and out of clarity; gestures repeat like memories misfiring. The intimacy of scale invites close-contact peering, while layered forms resist quick comprehension. It’s a slow burn of perceptual dissonance, pitched somewhere between deep dreaming and déjà vu. In many ways, Cedar paints observation itself—its rhythms, glitches, and gaps—inviting us to dwell in the space between glancing and seeing.

July 2, 2025July 1, 2025

Nanette Carter: A Question of Balance at Montclair Art Museum

Installation view. Photographer Peter Jacobs

Nanette Carter: A Question of Balance at the Montclair Art Museum is an extensive survey of 46 works from throughout the artist’s career curated by Mary Birmingham. Carter is known for her boundless abstractions and innovative works on mylar. This long-awaited show reflects Carter’s long history with the museum, the community, and the town itself. As one enters the show, the first piece is a video titled The Weight from the pandemic days, where Carter films herself balancing various pieces of her two-dimensional painting as more pieces get “stacked” onto the main mass. Setting the mood for the show, it not only introduces Nanette Carter in flesh but also important themes she has been working on throughout her career.

July 1, 2025June 27, 2025

Feeling the Onslaught of the Moment at Field of Play

Lauren Clark, Four Points Round, oil, acrylic, cotton mesh, copper, glass beads, iron, malachite, 40 x 20 inches

The exhibition at Field of Play gallery titled Onslaught of the Moment was wonderful, intriguing and timely all in one. The gallery’s exhibitions are always deeply considered and engaging, even within a smaller space, the works all shine and carry with them quite the presence. The shows are always curated with care, and this exhibition was no exception. Curated by Kate Sherman, the works of Lauren Clark, Masie Love, and Brian Karlsson each traverse space and show a progression of both time and experience through each artist’s process.

June 23, 2025June 18, 2025

ARCOlisboa 2025 and Lisbon’s Renaissance

Lisbon in May presents itself as both majestic and enigmatic, its urban landscape punctuated by clusters of jacaranda trees in full bloom, casting cascades of purple blossoms across streets and sky like botanical fireworks. The city’s legendary seven hills form a natural amphitheater overlooking the Tagus River, creating an endless choreography of ascent and descent through Escher-like topographies. Glossy marble cobblestones snake through a labyrinth of narrow streets, flanked by stately yet sometimes weathered palaces and residential buildings adorned with brightly colored azulejo tiles that catch and reflect the city’s crystalline light, making the entire urban fabric shimmer.

June 19, 2025June 15, 2025

UNBIND: FIGURING THE LAYERS OF BEING with the New York Studio School

Upon entering the exhibition I was struck at the presence every artist’s work had. While every piece was quite different from one another, they all shared similar conversations and offered viewers the opportunity to question human experience, histories, intimacy versus public viewing, and dealing with what it means to feel human. With nine artists, and diverse mediums, the complexities of being are shown clearly and each artist has their own take on “layers of being”.

June 18, 2025June 15, 2025

Art Spiel Picks: Philly Exhibitions in June 2025

HIGHLIGHTS

Installation view of *Tea Party* at Locks Gallery, courtesy of Locks Gallery

As we get into the summer months, June exhibition picks for Philadelphia are vibrant, sensuous, and bold. Works currently on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Locks Gallery, and Moore College of Art touch on subjects surrounding how we see ourselves and each other, and the transitory nature of existence. All things physical and sensual ultimately act as a foil to death, and these surreal and vivid works offer the viewer insight into how each artist considers what makes us human. Whether created of glitter, paint, ceramic, velvet, or butterflies, the works in these exhibitions remind us that we are stardust, and golden.

June 16, 2025June 15, 2025

The Treasure Below Grand

ISammy Bennett, *Above Grand (Echoes of Language as Code),* 2025, photo courtesy of Flaneurshan Studio

Where Air Turns to Fog at Below Grand, curated by Ray Hwang, gathers Sammy Bennett, Anna Gregor, and Jesse Ng in a sometimes cheeky, but overall multivalent and sincere, investigation of visual perception and the machinery of capital-F/capital-A Fine Art presentation. With his characteristic casual abandon, Hwang exploits the gallery’s awkward architecture to its full potential, letting Bennett install an upside-down trompe-l’œil “group show” in the street-facing walk-in window display while reserving the closet-sized back room for a collection of Gregor and Ng’s paintings.

June 13, 2025June 9, 2025

Those Who Fulfill the Infinite Labor of Love

Photo Story

Anya Kotler – “Never Alone IV” (2024) . Graphite on paper and paper mache, 13 × 9 in

The group exhibition titled Those Who Tend at the Warnes Contemporary in Brooklyn is an occasion in which 22 artists come together to celebrate their shared philosophy towards work and life. The title refers to the fact that all the artists here care for others in one form or another, whether they are parents of young children, grownups caring for their elderly parents, or supporting staff for people with disabilities.

June 12, 2025June 9, 2025

Matthew Wong – Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort at Albertina

Matthew Wong: The Space Between Trees, 2019, 60 × 50 cm, Oil on canvas (Collection of Judith and Danny Tobey © 2025 Matthew Wong Foundation / Bildrecht Vienna, 2025)ץ Photo: Matthew Wong Foundation

Matthew Wong and Vincent van Gogh shared more than a self-taught path into painting. Both began relatively late, worked in compressed time spans, and turned to painting as a lifeline. The superb exhibition Painting as a Last Resort, now on view at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, brings their work into intimate and revealing dialogue. The exhibition presents approximately 44 paintings and 12 works on paper by Wong alongside a smaller selection by van Gogh. Organized in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Kunsthaus Zürich, and the Matthew Wong Foundation, the exhibition gives Wong space to be seen on his own terms. His paintings feel jittery, open, and emotionally charged.

June 9, 2025June 6, 2025

Judith Simonian: The Human Element Huddled and Still

Installation View. Courtesy of JJMurphy Gallery

Judith Simonian’s solo show at JJ Murphy Gallery, poignantly titled The Human Element, Huddled and Still, features her latest paintings from the past few years. At first glance, there is familiarity in each piece – a living room, a still life, part of a ship – but as one starts to look closer, something starts to happen. Within each painting, there is a portal into another world; there are clashing planes and changing scenes that are so seamlessly blended together the viewer’s brain needs some time to catch up. What is particularly astounding about Simonian’s work is that her subject matter is a humble amalgamation of scenes, spaces, and objects one would encounter in everyday life.