art – Art Spiel

October 7, 2026October 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Plumb Line: Irit Baniel and Alexis Granwell at Medium Rare

Medium Rare Project Space in DUMBO opens the season with Plumb Line, a two-person show pairing Irit Baniel’s paintings with Alexis Granwell’s sculptures. The two artists work with different materials and processes, but their work shares a concern with the body, vulnerability, memory, and grief. Medium Rare is an artist-led space rooted in making, looking and conversation. Surrounded by artists and studios, it has close ties to the Brooklyn art community and uses exhibitions, talks and workshops to connect artists with a wider public. In this conversation, co-founder Narelle Sissons discusses the curatorial process, the visual axis linking the two artists, the venue’s origins, and its plans for the year ahead.

October 6, 2026October 2, 2026, by Gail Winbury

The Prime of Your Life at Marc Straus

Francis Barth, Bridging, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 30” x 40”, photo courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery

Aging is a paradox. Wisdom and clarity of purpose increase, while deterioration and physical impairments begin to ravage the body. The exhibition and panel, The Prime of Your Life, at Marc Straus Gallery, exemplifies that dichotomy, bringing to bear aging female artists’ dilemmas while celebrating their enduring passion, talent, and productivity.

October 2, 2026October 1, 2026, by Sherly Fan

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.

September 29, 2026September 29, 2026, by Art Spiel

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.

September 16, 2026September 15, 2026, by Art Spiel

Alexander Gray Associates Announces Representation of Márcia Falcão

Alexander Gray Associates announces representation of Márcia Falcão (b. 1985). In Spring 2028, the Gallery will present a solo exhibition of Falcão’s works.

Falcão explores the Black female body as a site where painterly experimentation and lived experience converge. Raised in Rio de Janeiro’s Irajá neighborhood, Falcão renders her figures in gestural brushwork and dense layers of impasto, working within a palette dominated by earth tones—umbers, reds, tans, and yellows. Though Falcão frequently depicts her own body, her figures resist self-portraiture, functioning instead as archetypes that challenge the expectations and stereotypes imposed upon Black Brazilian women.

September 4, 2026September 4, 2026, by Art Spiel

P•P•O•W Appoints Trey Hollis as Managing Partner

Wendy Olsoff and Penny Pilkington, co-founders of P•P•O•W, are pleased to announce the appointment of Trey Hollis as Managing Partner, based in New York.

As Managing Partner, Hollis will continue to oversee P•P•O•W’s programmatic activities, gallery operations, exhibition management, facilities, and the gallery’s participation in international art fairs. Collaborating closely with the gallery ownership, directors, and operations team, Hollis will help ensure the continued strength and efficiency of all aspects of the gallery while supporting P•P•O•W’s represented artists and exhibition program.

August 19, 2026August 17, 2026, by Ming Chen

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.

July 13, 2026July 12, 2026, by Hayley Ferber

What Remains, What Connects: Tulu Bayar Explores Home Through Material and Memory

In What Remains, What Connects: Stories in Assembly, on view at Amos Eno Gallery, Tulu Bayar brings together two distinct yet deeply connected bodies of work that approach the question of “what is home?” from different perspectives. Together, they reveal home not as a fixed location but as something more amorphous, continually assembled through lived experience, collective memory, and our relationship to place.

July 8, 2026July 8, 2026, by Sivan Lavie

Andreas Schulze’s exploration of color in the cool pastures of cake

In his show Cake (2026) at Sprüth Magers, New York, Andreas Schulze explores the visual effects of saturated color and geometric form, using cake as the setting for his investigation.

In his paintings, Schulze creates an inner three-dimensional universe, which serves as a bell jar. In his imaginary pastures, Schulze creates surreal interiorscapes, built of geometric shapes and flat backdrops of color-gradient skies, juxtaposed with rounded spheres and spirals painted in three-dimensional perspective, with depth and shadow. The pictorial space he builds gives a stage for him to explore various phenomena, in this case, cake, and he does so with a playful seriousness, experimenting with the basic forms and images that make up cakes: candles, frosting, fruit, sprinkles, and layers.

July 6, 2026July 6, 2026, by Amanda Church

Tommy May: Sammy’s at Half Gallery

Life’s a beach, or maybe it should be if it could only resemble Tommy May’s resplendent scenes of light reflecting on Sammy’s bay beach on the east end of Long Island. Are beach scenes banal? Despite a robust art-historical lineage of beach paintings ranging from Milton Avery to Alex Katz, not to mention myriad others, including Picasso, Monet, and Degas, there’s a tendency to relegate the genre to kitschy decoration, best suited for motel rooms or dentists’ offices. Despite a softness to May’s surfaces that could cross into that territory, the paintings deftly skirt it through their atmospheric intensity and sophisticated touch.