artreview – Art Spiel

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.

June 26, 2026June 24, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

From A to Z and the Bodies In Between at Nunu

Borges once described a fictional Chinese encyclopedia that classified animals into categories so incompatible — beings that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that look like flies from a distance — that the whole idea of classification begins to feel like a kind of absurd fiction. Nancy Bowen’s first solo exhibition at Nunu Fine Art invokes exactly that suspicion: that the dictionary, the archive, the great pre-internet repositories of everything, are not neutral records but constructions, and that constructions can be dismantled, embellished, and made to mean something new.