contemporary painting – Page 3

June 19, 2026September 2, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Pouch Power Women: with Brenda Zlamany

Installation view, Seven Women Chase Icebergs, The Re Institute

What starts as an open call and a group text to trusted friends becomes, two years later, an exhibition that feels inevitable. Seven Women Chase Icebergs, on view at The Re Institute in Millerton, NY, brings together seven painters whose friendships span decades and continents: Rome, Skowhegan, Triangle, Braziers. Organized by Brooklyn-based artist Brenda Zlamany — creator of The Itinerant Portraitist and a painter whose practice has long centered on community as both subject and method — the show grew from a month-long residency at Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, where the group painted, hiked, shared meals, and chased icebergs along the edge of the Atlantic. We spoke with Zlamany about friendship as curatorial logic, landscape as psychological mirror, and what it means to build something together at the edge of the world.

June 18, 2026June 16, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Strata of Time: a burying and unearthing of new discoveries at Elorea

Stepping into the exhibition Strata of Time at Elorea, the focus is not only on the works hanging on the walls but also the fragrances around them as well. With works placed throughout a perfume shop, Herok was given the opportunity to respond to the fragrances surrounding his works. He uses his process of layering to overlay different colors, materials, and experiences of both to mimic the processes the perfume makers used to create their products, as they mix and meld various scents. The works are nicely displayed throughout the space; some works, like Out of Field 5, Out of Field 4, and See You Again, are displayed alongside products, while other walls allow works to stand on their own. This is an interesting exhibition collaboration that grew from studying the products and interviewing store personnel, a process that generated a new body of work carrying as many small details within the surfaces as the fragrances carry within the perfumes.

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 11, 2026June 10, 2026, by Michal Gavish

Voices In Minor Keys: 2026 Venice Biennale

In Minor Keys, the central exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale, arrived with a quiet proposition. The late curator Koyo Kouho envisioned a show that reflects practices requiring time and sustained commitment — some of them lifetime, even generational — and in doing so created a deliberate antithesis to the Biennale spectacle. Drawing almost exclusively on artists from Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean, the exhibition is anchored in political concerns — identity, immigration, the environment — yet so many of the works felt personal, while reaching toward art history and even toward Venice itself. What follows is an account of its visual depth and strength.

June 10, 2026July 5, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

A Studio That Became a Gallery: 81 Leonard

What began as Nancy Pantirer’s studio in 1996 has grown, over nearly three decades, into a gallery with a clear sense of purpose. Rooted in years of open studios and informal salon gatherings, 81 Leonard formalized its public presence in 2019, building a platform shaped by artists, for artists. Co-run with Hannah Rothbard, the gallery supports emerging and mid-career artists at pivotal moments in their careers, with a program that prizes beauty, technical competence, and community. Group shows grow organically from the artists themselves. We spoke with Nancy Pantirer and Hannah Rothbard about how 81 Leonard came to be, what drives its program, and what it means to run a gallery with no plans to be anywhere else.

June 2, 2026June 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Run by Artists, Built for Artists: OyG and the Cornell MFA

What does a gallery look like when the artists are in charge? Founded in 2013, Ortega y Gasset Projects (OyG) is an artist-run collective with no fixed curatorial line and a non-hierarchical structure shared equally among its eight co-directors. Since 2023, it has become the annual New York home for Cornell University’s MFA thesis exhibition — a partnership built on a simple premise: artist-run spaces value experimentation, innovation, and risk-taking, giving graduate artists the freedom to present work without commercial constraints or curatorial imperatives.

June 1, 2026June 1, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Kosuke Kawahara’s Without Innocence, Dissecting and Reassembling at RAINRAIN Gallery

Stepping into the exhibition Without Innocence at RAINRAIN gallery, you are greeted with a plethora of various mediums, ideas, influences, and experimentations. The paintings carry with them several levels of looking, small details to explore, and multiple dimensions within the edges. The photographs set the scene, allowing you to enter another space just as the paintings do, left to explore the worlds that Kawahara creates and builds within it all. The press release introduces a quote from Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, “…we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system—from all work to all play, a deadly game (p 28).” This statement lingers alongside my thoughts throughout the exhibition, as I begin to notice more details, connections, and mechanisms that make this exhibition immensely similar to a cyborg in the making. Kawahara takes pieces of the body and fractions of different spaces within the canvas to build something entirely new out of all of these information systems.

May 28, 2026May 28, 2026, by Yasmeen Abdallah

It Takes a Village at Freight and Volume

The most subtle acts are often the most cathartic. In times of relentless upheaval and injustice, simple moments can feel Herculean by measure. The current exhibition at Freight and Volume, It Takes A Village, focuses on daily ritual as a gate of entry. Artists Andrea Castillo, Nancy Elsamanoudi, and Baran Shafiey blend nuanced elements with doses of surreality, resulting in invitations into spaces that delightfully offer more questions than answers. Each work is a reckoning with the quietude of in-betweenness. Each artist is a painter working in figuration; yet the similarities end there, and the departures are as varied as one can imagine.

May 25, 2026May 27, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Daniel Wiener at Satchel Projects: Out in front of the back of beyond

Out in Front of the Back of Beyond, the title of Daniel Wiener’s current solo exhibition at Satchel Projects, is a perfect pitch for the work on view. The notion of “front and back” strikes a strong chord throughout — explicit in the freestanding sculptures, hinted at in the wall pieces.

May 12, 2026May 9, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Carter Burden Gallery: Why Material Matters

Few New York galleries build their programs around the kind of organizing principle that anchors Carter Burden Gallery. Since 2008, the Chelsea space has focused on artists with long careers that haven’t followed conventional commercial arcs. Here, Associate Executive Director Marlena Vaccaro and Assistant Director Sarah Leon discuss the gallery’s mission, the values guiding their curatorial choices, the thinking behind the current exhibition, Material Matters, and what that focus has opened up.