abstract art – Page 2

November 18, 2025November 18, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Singing in Unison, Part 12: Painting in Space

Judy Pfaff, *Barcelona*, 1990, steel, plastic, glass, table and chairs, 168 x 168 x 168 inches

It began, as many enduring ideas do, over wine and conversation. Michael David, painter, curator, and gallerist of M. David & Co., was speaking at a dinner with Judy Pfaff about her close friend and early champion Al Held. The talk drifted to another dear friend, Elizabeth Murray, and then to her admiration for Frank Stella. From that exchange evolved the idea for Singing in Unison, Part 12: Painting in Space, curated by Michael David, and now on view at Art Cake in cooperation with The Brooklyn Rail.

November 17, 2025December 1, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Fran Shalom: Everyday Improvisations at Kathryn Markel

Fran Shalom’s paintings reduce form to its essentials while preserving the marks of revision and doubt. The surface becomes a record of both decision and hesitation, clarity and its undoing. Her compositions are direct yet ambivalent. Airy lines float within vivid color fields, their edges both firm and uncertain, altogether suggesting a state of being through color, motion, and gesture rather than representation. They obstinately remain abstract, teasing recognition without granting it.

October 13, 2025October 7, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Frances Smokowski at Cavin-Morris Gallery

In Dialogue

Installation view, Cavin-Morris Gallery, photo courtesy the artist

In 2017, during post-concussion recovery and before considering any public audience, Frances Smokowski began drawing as part of her wellness routines. She knew even then that the work could one day be useful and inspiring to others, and she never felt it existed only for her. Pandemic-era synchronicities later led to gallery representation, confirming that this is the moment for her bio-glyphics and energy-scapes to come forward.

October 6, 2025October 9, 2025, by Hovey Brock

Ashley Garrett: Psyche at September

*Welling,* 2025, oil on canvas, 65” x 115”

Psyche, Ashley Garrett’s exhibition of paintings at September Gallery in Kinderhook, has a mix of large and small oil paintings, and pastels. The small works have a restless energy emphasized by Garrett’s staccato mark-making. The large canvases give Garrett’s brush plenty of room to deliver longer, more fluid gestures. This freedom allows her paint strokes to slide over and under each other in a flow that can give her compositions a quiet intensity, like tall grass seething in a high wind. Garrett has lightened up her palette to include more pinks and a range of whites and pale grays.

October 2, 2025October 3, 2025, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Double Vision: One Artist, Two Solo Shows, Double the Stripes

Portrait of the artist, photo courtesy of Elizabeth Haynes

In early September, painter Deborah Zlotsky pulled off what few artists even attempt: two solo shows opening at once, on opposite sides of Manhattan. The Light Gets In filled McKenzie Fine Art on the Lower East Side, while Genealogies took over Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in Chelsea. A double dip in one city, on one calendar page. It might sound like a scheduling accident, yet standing in front of her candy-striped canvases, the simultaneity feels deliberate. Zlotsky thrives on overlap: order brushing against disorder, geometry trembling at its edges, patterns that carry memory while stumbling into the present.

August 28, 2025August 31, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

MIST – Fleeting moments and Summer Sensibilities at Helm Contemporary

Installation view, Sylvia Schwartz, *Temperature Gauge and Word Landscape and Green, photo courtesy of Helm Contemporary*

In MIST, four artists are brought together to take the inspiration of summer, and find a way to break through the heatwaves that have recently hit New York. There is a dialogue between the artists and their various takes on works on paper, bringing forth summer sensibilities, airiness, freshness, and a feeling of being free. Each artist offers a different series of works.

August 18, 2025August 13, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Taylor Bielecki: The Essence of a Moment

In Dialogue

*Essence of a Moment, Installation view*

The Essence of a Moment, a group exhibition presenting a collection of artists’ contemplations on the makings of a moment. A moment is by its nature fleeting, and it’s by our nature as people that we seek to extend or preserve them; despite their intangibility. This group show engages with the questions – How can one define something as nebulous as a moment? Is it done retrospectively after it has passed? Is it a confluence of occurrences? Or perhaps it exists with the body’s perception of the present moment? These works offer a variety of insights and perspectives into understanding a moment.

July 23, 2025July 21, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Susan Mastrangelo: The Beat Goes On at Kathryn Markel

In Dialogue

Susan Mastrangelo’s solo show, The Beat Goes On, at The Pocket Gallery of Katherine Markel Fine Arts features work completed from 2022 to 2025, with the majority of the pieces completed in 2025. Mastrangelo creates bold reliefs that transform a variety of materials into bold abstract and biomorphic forms.

July 8, 2025July 7, 2025, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Why Black Art Is Rarely Just Abstract

Algernon Miller’s work bends space, time, and expectations, redefining what abstraction means when history isn’t optional

*Algernon Miller Afrofuturism and Beyond*, Installation view, courtesy of Ethan Cohen Gallery

I met Algernon Miller the way I tend to meet people in the art world: by asking too many earnest questions at a panel. That day, at a Mel Edwards talk at Hauser & Wirth, I caught a smile from the soft-spoken man next to me. We chatted and clicked. Two native New Yorkers—he from Harlem, I from the Lower East Side—drawn together by chance, we followed each other with no particular reason, and what felt like nothing quietly became something.

July 2, 2025July 1, 2025, by Anna Shukeylo

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.