contemporary art – Art Spiel

September 30, 2026September 30, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

SPRING/BREAK highlights: Hide and Seek

This year’s theme for SPRING/BREAK Art Show was Hide and Seek. The fair was within this new and exciting office space that felt like a labyrinth at first, but then it evolved into a wonderful journey- meeting new artists and old friends. Full of amazing works and installations, the booths caught my attention through either a detail, a connection, or a wonderful conversation. The themes varied, from Peter Gynd’s focus on the joys of the everyday to Juan-Manuel Pinzon and Matthew Logsdon’s connections through material, action, and discovery. David Howe and Jesus Benavente’s team brings urgency and humor, showing how decisions from up high affect our everyday lives. My experience of the fair concluded with the works of Noa Charuvi and Shmuel Charuvi, exploring connections to a sense of place and ways of viewing the world, often influenced by the works of family, while Braden Bandel’s paintings and drawings bring us into another world entirely- allowing us a place to rest and contemplate.

September 2, 2026August 29, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

The Pandora’s BoxX Project: Grace Roselli

Grace Roselli’s Pandora’s BoxX Project began as something personal: a way to reconnect with a world of artists she’d drifted from while raising two daughters, much of it as a single mother. She started by photographing the few women artists she still knew; each led her to another, and the project grew by conversation and recommendation rather than plan. Nearly 360 portraits later — of artists alongside curators, writers, historians, educators, and museum directors — it had become a record of a community whose influence has rarely been seen whole. Roselli photographs each sitter in their own home or studio, in available light. She then lets them choose the final image, because the portrait isn’t finished until both of them recognize the person in it. Roselli discusses the project’s origins, her way of working, and what nearly 360 encounters revealed.

September 1, 2026September 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Atay Ilgun and Jonathan Carmel on ./spiral at Fondazione Aversano

How does a field barely a decade old start to have a past? ./spiral takes up that question, gathering eleven artists who were present at the early days of AI, code, and blockchain art and asking each to pick up a formative work, tool, or loose end and carry it forward from where they are now. For co-curator Atay Ilgun, a London-based artist and technologist, the burst of new tools between 2017 and 2022 has only lately settled far enough into the past to be seen clearly. His fellow curator, SuperRare’s Jonathan Carmel, describes the return as a way of moving forward by first turning around. The works cross from screen into matter along the way, Helena Sarin’s ceramics drawing AI imagery toward ancient clay, Robbie Barrat’s Plexiglas prints nudging it back toward the glow of a monitor. Presented by SuperRare at Justin Aversano’s Fondazione Aversano in New York, September 3–10. Here, Ilgun and Carmel discuss how the show came together, the move from screen to object, and the histories their artists carry forward.

August 31, 2026September 1, 2026, by Adria Arch

Image vs Object – Isabel Riley, John Guthrie, and Judy Riola

Isabel Riley, Cardinal Directions of the Heart

Michelle Mercaldo, an artist and master craftsperson in her own right, is hosting a strong group show in her jewelry showroom, featuring the work of Isabel Riley, John Guthrie, and Judy Riola. Michelle’s own practice is in fine metalwork, and that sensibility, precision, and materiality, with a feel for surface, inform whose work she chooses to put on her walls.

August 26, 2026September 2, 2026, by Sara Aparicio

Big Ideas, Tiny Work: Hashimoto Contemporary’s Amuse-Bouche Show Returns

Installation view of Hashimoto Contemporary's Amuse-Bouche

If you missed Hashimoto Contemporary’s Amuse-Bouche group show last spring, fret not. The miniature show is returning for the second year in a row, featuring twenty-one artists, including four returning artists: Mary Finlayson, Sara Hagale, Gabe Langholtz, and Andrew Watch. Some of the other participating artists also include Hashimoto Contemporary-represented artists Devra Fox and Seanna Hong.

August 25, 2026August 25, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Blizzard at Dimin Gallery- intertwined times- nostalgia, stillness, and ecological urgency

Installation view, Blizzard, Dimin Gallery

Walking into Dimin gallery on a humid summer day, Blizzard, the exhibition currently on view, envelops you with a welcoming dynamic, though like a winter storm, often all-encompassing, bitter, and fierce. Despite these negative associations coinciding with the theme of blizzard , there is a sense of peace and serenity while observing a storm safely. As long as you are observing from a safe distance, both the winter season and its storms can offer great solace and opportunities for contemplation. Similar to the work in this show, we are welcomed to dive into the environments of the works and take note of what themes are driving the artists. Given our growing concerns over climate change, global warming, and changes in the environment, this exhibition is very timely; especially ecologically, this show calls for attention. These artists certainly show how a snow day can slow time and force us to have more respect for the unyielding natural world.

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.

August 18, 2026August 17, 2026, by Chunbum Park

Bing Lu: The Queries that Remain After the Image

Bing Lu’s solo exhibition, “what remains after the image,” at Gallery 60 NYC is an endeavor of multifaceted inquiries concerning the nature of photography and image production, abstraction, and the artist’s own personal life. Featuring 13 photographic works that utilize digital collaging and color manipulation techniques, the exhibition is an exercise in experimental spirit for Lu to continually push the boundaries and investigate the abstract and experimental language of photography.

August 17, 2026August 20, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Cutaway at Brandeis University

For Cutaway, curator Olivia Baldwin worked the way she does in her own studio — building from the ground up, beginning with the artists rather than a theme. She had followed Eleanor Anderson, J Stoner Blackwell, Lucy Kim, Kirstin Lamb, and Hai-Wen Lin for years, looking for where their materials might overlap and where they might productively rub against one another. Meeting with them, a shared concern surfaced: how each artist asserts and then loosens the limits of an object, a body, a pattern. Their means are strikingly varied — discarded plastic bags, cross stitch, dyed silk and chain, cast flounder and teeth, a kite pitched toward the upper windows — bound by saturated color and touch. The body recurs throughout, rarely pictured, more often left as a trace in the material. Baldwin discusses the show’s bottom-up beginnings, what its materials share, and the withholding behind its title.

August 13, 2026August 13, 2026, by Cristina Albu

Anne Katrine Senstad – Being (Un)schooled

Crossing the threshold of the “Veieja Escuelera” exhibition at Synesthesia Gallery, Brooklyn, visitors find themselves enveloped in an eerie haze of green light that is both sensuous and disquieting. This is not the only defamiliarizing element since the floor is carpeted with artificial grass and the light works encompass phrases in multiple languages. On Anne Katrine Senstad’s turf, nothing is what it seems at first sight. A Norwegian artist living between New York and Oslo, she uses light both environmentally and sculpturally to expose the interdependence between perceptual experience, cognition, and ideological beliefs. Her practice engages both with the phenomenological inquiries of minimalist artists such as Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin and with the tongue-in-cheek propositions of Conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth and Bruce Nauman who have paired neon light with text to invite reflection on the function of art as sign.