color theory – Art Spiel

August 4, 2026August 4, 2026, by Meg Lipke

Polychrome at Bernay Fine Arts

Installation view: Polychrome, Bernay Fine Art

Polychrome, on view at Bernay Fine Arts, brings together paintings by Jenny Kemp, Audrey Stone, and Deborah Zlotsky in an exhibition on abstraction and geometric structure. Across three distinct practices, the artists use color as structure and sensory experience, although each arrives at abstraction through her own internal logic. Here abstraction is a form of concentration, examining the texture of experience: how can attention intensify and shift? How can time accumulate? How can systems hold together and slip apart? Artist Meg Lipke, a long-time colleague and friend of the artists, visited the show and addressed questions for the following conversation.

June 22, 2026June 17, 2026, by Sivan Lavie

Hum and Song: Helen Frankenthaler’s The Moment and the Distance at Gagosian examined alongside Babara Guest’s writings

Helen Frankenthaler, The Moment and the Distance, 2026, installation view

Helen Frankenthaler’s show at Gagosian New York, The Moment & The Distance is a beautiful retrospective survey of her work. The title is inspired by a mid-career essay by Barbara Guest that encapsulates the essence of Frankenthaler’s work. In the 1975 essay Guest defines Frankenthaler’s oeuvre in terms of music. She reflects that while there is beautiful “humming” in Frankenthaler’s early work, over her career it becomes “song”. As her work matures, Guest argues, Frankenthaler becomes more decisive, methodical and assured in her practice, less spontaneous or reliant on happy accidents. Beyond demonstrating the present moment in the paintings, she walks the effortful distance to “consolidate her terms”.

June 17, 2026June 18, 2026, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Well, Hell. Beautiful. Mary Shah and Rachael Wren at Rick Wester Fine Art

No one was supposed to say “beautiful.” Oh God, no. Not in the mid-1990s art scene I knew, when I worked at a then-trendy, high-gloss art magazine and beauty had all the social standing of a shrimp cocktail at a theory seminar. Beauty was too easy and too ready to come in smiling and ruin everyone’s severe little mood. A serious work could resist you from across the room. But beautiful? Beautiful was what your aunt said when she had run out of things to say.

Then I walked into Mary Shah and Rachael Wren’s In the Ecstasy of the Sun at Rick Wester Fine Art and thought: well, hell. Beautiful.

June 3, 2026June 13, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Maria Gil Lucientes: Letting the Materials Misbehave

Maria Gil Lucientes, Circles series backdrop

Maria Gil Lucientes paints in the slim margin where a system starts to come undone. She begins with a constraint, a single color, a periodic screen, a piece of medical gauze, then lets the materials misbehave. In Pareidolia, gauze shifted by air becomes the suggestion of a face. A Spanish-born painter who studied mathematics, physics, and computer science before a decade in tech, Lucientes brings a system-builder’s discipline to a practice that hinges on chance. Here, she reflects on the path from science to painting, the dialogue between control and surprise in her process, and the new Moiré series taking shape in her studio.

April 21, 2026April 19, 2026, by Hantian Zhang

Gabriele Münter – Contouring a World

Gabriele Münter, Still Life with Figure I (Mrs. Simonovich)

Entering the fourth floor of the Guggenheim, you are met with fields, mountains, lakes of the Bavarian Alps, daily objects, and people—bright, saturated colors held together by dark edges. The exhibition brings together landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, with a focus on Münter’s early Expressionist years alongside later paintings.

December 10, 2025December 13, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Spectral Evidence: A deeper introspection on Color, Light, and Energy

Installation view, photo courtesy of the Shirley Project Space

Walking into this show on a cold, blustery night, you are greeted by large windows illuminated out by gallery light. Inside, you are met with a collection of color, light, and energy. Each piece in the exhibition Spectral Evidence uses mainly acrylic to illuminate new spaces by dissolving edges, blending colors, and allowing gradients to calmly and smoothly envelope the space within the works. While each artist in the show has their own take on creating their own spaces, they use many conventions of painting and abstraction to create new forms and environments to experience, and each piece seems to flow well into the next. The gallery layout lends itself to a meandering space.

October 21, 2025October 20, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Johnny g mullen: Rehearsals in Movement

Installation View, (photo courtesy of Yanmei Jiang)

Walking into Peninsula gallery, an intimate space in the Two Bridges neighborhood, viewers are greeted with the energetic and punchy paintings in Johnny Mullen’s solo show- rehearsals in movement. Mullen has pinpointed his focus on layering paint, motion, and plays with both transparency and opacity in this new series. With the gallery itself being so intimate, you get a close and personal view of the works, a deeper look that proves very rewarding. Meandering from one painting to the next, each of a consistent size, you get to join mullen on his explorations within each piece. Expanding from his interest in color theory, Mullen has added an expanded investigation of layering and gesture within the pieces.

September 16, 2025September 14, 2025, by Anna Shukeylo

Painters to Watch: The Armory Show 2025 Recap

Installation View, Doron Lanberg at Victoria Miro, courtesy of the writer

With the excitement of the art fairs behind us it’s time to take one look back at The Armory Show and note a couple artists to watch this year who clearly stood out in the whirlwind of that weekend.

June 9, 2025June 6, 2025, by Anna Shukeylo

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.

June 4, 2025June 4, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

Salman Toor and Intimate Histories at Luhring Augustine

Salman Toor - Wish Maker - Exhibitions - Luhring Augustine — Salman Toor at Luhring Augustine

This exhibition of Salman Toor’s paintings acts like snapshots in a story or a movie, each depicting a separate experience. Every piece draws you in and carries a true push and pull within the composition. The push and pull that drew me in was the idea of public versus private that emanates from within the work, the dream and reality, and just how much intimacy Toor decides to share with us. The feelings of intimacy and vulnerability come from witnessing the lives of the figures Toor presents, leaving us to wonder if we are allowed to bear witness to these moments, or if we’ve just “walked into” something meant to be entirely private.