canvas painting – Art Spiel

March 18, 2026March 17, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Kylie Heidenheimer: Attenuated Figuration

Kylie Heidenheimer came to painting through an early interest in art restoration. After high school, she attended Grinnell College in Iowa, where she studied chemistry, art history, and 2-D studio art. Following her freshman year, she spent the summer as an art restoration intern at the Museum für Völkerkunde in then West Berlin. While there, she began drawing and painting with gouache on paper on her own. By the end of that summer, she had decided to pursue art seriously. Not long after, her focus shifted to oil painting.

Her path toward abstraction grew out of a strong foundation in figurative work. After her sophomore year at Grinnell, she returned to St. Louis to attend art school at Washington University. The core program was rigorous and heavily figurative, with intensive anatomy drawing and figure sculpture classes, followed by a return to painting.

December 10, 2024December 10, 2024, by Anna Shukeylo

Object Relations: Michael Gac Levin at My Pet Ram

A painting of a living room

Description automatically generated — We Had an Agreement, 28”x24”, Acrylic on canvas

As one enters My Pet Ram’s humble gallery space full of moderately-sized Gustonesque paintings, the viewer is transported into the surreal personal nooks and crannies of Michael Gac Levin’s reality. His paintings are heavily influenced by his family life. Familiar landscapes are juxtaposed with foreign characters and shapes. The artist tells a fantastical story in this new body of work through a day in the life of two characters embodied by an apple and a tree-like figure.

July 20, 2023July 19, 2023, by Art Spiel

Ashley Garret: Ambrosia at SEPTEMBER

Featured Artist

A room with paintings on the wall

Description automatically generated — *Ambrosia* installation view. Photo by Pete Mauney

Ashley Garrett: Ambrosia, Garrett’s second solo show at SEPTEMBER in Kinderhook, NY, features a body of work she has made over three years—some evolved over years and others more quickly. Garrett has been working on large-scale 94 x 57-inch paintings on canvas since 2019. Garrett says that the weaving of brushstrokes creates a space that changes perspective between up and down, water and air. The gallery space also offers an experience of movement with sight lines through three distinct rooms. In the installation, small paintings on canvas can be seen from each corner of the rooms to the farthest corners of the gallery.

December 5, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Peter Cvik at Zoya Museum Modra in Slovakia

Featured Artist

A person standing in front of a painting

Description automatically generated with medium confidence — Portrait in Zoya Private Museum Solo Show “semagdniM”. Photocredit: Juraj Fifik

For the last few years the Slovak painter Peter Cvik has been layering different experiences and stories out of sheer visual memory. Without using photos or any other found imagery, Cvik builds new positions of “synthetic” reality that reminds us of something real or experienced within a flux of time where memories float. His landscapes evoke a sense of collision between opposing worlds without evoking the sense of a specific place. Peter Cvik equates his paintings to a sentence that ends with three dots which viewers can complete on their own.

February 27, 2020May 30, 2020, by Peiyue Wu

Controlled Entropy, Taher Jaoui at 81 Leonard Gallery

*Taher Jaoui: Controlled Entropy installation view, photograph by Hannah Rozelle, photo courtesy of the artist*

One might find Taher Jaoui introverted the moment meeting him. It might be less about an aloof temperament commonly found in an artist than a reserved and prudent character often associated with a science person. The way in which Jaoui’s artworks act out follows a similar interpersonal pattern. Those scratchy mathematics signs and formulas are the most prominent elements of the new series of monochrome paintings featured in Taher’s current solo exhibition Controlled Entropy at 81 Leonard Gallery, co-hosted by Uncommon Beauty Gallery. The juxtaposition of the handwritings of mathematical formulas and the gestural brushwork in an abstract expressionist manner not only prompts questions about Jaoui’s background, but also problematizes the hostile split between art and mathematics. Reminding viewers of a lecturer running a mathematical calculation across the blackboard with chalk, this series of paintings highlights the performative elements in mathematics, as well as the craft aspects of labor invested in this intellectual activity.