contemporary painting – Page 4

May 4, 2026May 4, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Yuyo- Julián Kreimer at the Sarah Lawrence Heimbold Visual Arts Center

Before his artist talk, Julián Kreimer set a small brown valise on the table and opened it. Inside, folders held drawings on paper, each made in response to a photographic slide from his parents’ archive. The valise was not part of the exhibition; it was the working material behind it, a private archive he had been drawing through for years. Encountering it set the terms for the room next door: Yuyo is what happens when that interior is opened out.

April 30, 2026April 30, 2026, by Sivan Lavie

When I Stopped in Feldwood: Jeff Feld at Marquee Projects

Jeff Feld’s invented, minimalist island of Feldwood transports its audience into a tropical, still space that is at once childlike and naive, holy in its fetishizing of the pathetic object and rooted in place.

April 22, 2026April 21, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Cynthia Pareja Dubin at the Oyster Point Hotel

The Artist in Residence program at The Oyster Point Hotel was launched in 2020 and curated by Ellen Martin, with the support of Kevin Barry, the hotel’s President. Its premise is straightforward: contemporary art belongs not only in galleries but in the spaces where people actually live, rest, and move through their days. Each year, a selected artist’s work inhabits the hotel’s guest rooms, common areas, and the fabric of the place itself, encountered by thousands of visitors during their stay.

April 17, 2026April 16, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Memories, Recollections and Everyday Life, Xiangjie Rebecca Wu at Latitude Gallery

Installation Shot, A Room Rehearses its Own

Upon entering the exhibition at Latitude Gallery, you are greeted with a poem as a silent welcome, the cadence of the poem setting both the scene and the pace of the exhibition, titled A Room Rehearses its Own. In this exhibition, the paintings of Xiangjie Rebecca Wu piece together place, memory, and silence, with an impactful portrayal through both presence and absence.

April 15, 2026April 16, 2026, by Adria Arch

Yuko Oda – Decaying into Bloom

Installation view of Decaying into Bloom

Yuko Oda’s recent exhibit, Decaying into Bloom, currently on view at the Brodigan Gallery at the Groton School, located west of Boston, seduces with beauty and delivers a gut-punch from the moment you enter. It is the best kind of artistic experience: being pulled in by the sensuality of the materials, then hit hard with the poignancy of the message. Living things have always had to adapt to new conditions, and Oda imagines for us some ingenious possibilities.

April 9, 2026April 12, 2026, by Anna Shukeylo

Elisa Jensen at Astor Weeks, A Quiet Pause in Chaotic Times

Nestled on the 3rd floor of 209 Canal Street, off a particularly bustling block in Chinatown, is a show of Elisa Jensen’s paintings titled Invitation politely, at Astor Weeks Gallery. These works echo Bonnard’s complex compositions with windows and the depth of space in Vuillard’s work. The paintings are various memories of places close to the artist’s heart: her home in Brooklyn, the house of her late parents that no longer stands, and her aunt and uncle’s home in Denmark. Jensen knows how to whisper through paint and tell a quiet poem in scumbles, with a profound feeling of color. Her playful use of iridescent paint leaves the paintings to be experienced as they change drastically with subtle shifts in lighting. It is as if each painting carries many versions of itself throughout the course of the day, as the light changes.

April 6, 2026March 30, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Tobias Pils: Shh at Mumok Vienna

Tobias Pils’s paintings do not give themselves up quickly. It took me two long visits to begin to grasp his extensive solo exhibition at Mumok, curated by Manuela Ammer across two floors and ten years of work. The show traces a practice rooted in personal experience and daily life, charting a shift from floor to easel painting and revealing how drawing and painting remain in constant dialogue throughout. The layout rewards sustained attention and makes the changes over time visible. I viewed the exhibition in reverse, starting with the floor of Pils’s most recent works.

March 30, 2026March 29, 2026, by Michal Gavish

Zhang Huan: The Ash Paintings, at 125 Newbury Gallery

It has been over ten years since the last New York exhibition of the Chinese artist Zhang Huan, known for his edgy political performance pieces documented at the exhibition. What captured me on this visit was his ash paintings, which extended across the entire front hall of the gallery. It feels entirely appropriate that this social activist artist, who later turned to Buddhism, should exhibit these works in New York at such a tense moment. Ash, as a medium, touches on absolute destruction. It carries deep meaning in Buddhist practice, but these days it also pulls toward something harder to name: the daily accumulation of impure ash on the ground of cities being destroyed.

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.

March 16, 2026March 16, 2026, by Noa Charuvi

Call Of The Mountain

In Cynthia Daighnault’s exhibition at Olney Gleason, the walls are covered with different versions of the same subject: Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. A natural wonder and a national treasure at risk, Denali has lost over 60 percent of its glacier mass, and rising temperatures have accelerated permafrost thaw and disrupted local ecosystems, directly affecting the wildlife that depend on it. The paintings in this exhibition preserve their likelihood like the sculpture of the last three rhinos (by Gillie and Marc, now installed at 441 Ninth Avenue), but this documentation of endangered species contains an underlying criticism of American megalomania, without escaping the artist’s own American identity and ambitions. A big, beautiful white thing, Denali’s demise mirrors the nation’s uncertain future and the accumulative effect of its past.