contemporary painting – Page 5

March 11, 2026March 17, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Spirit in the Flesh at Utopia

Spirit in the Flesh is on view at UTOPIA in Kingston, the gallery, bookstore, and studio space founded in 2025 by Lucia Cote. Curated by Saul Chernick, the exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, and works on paper by Courtney Puckett, Ben Pederson, and Chernick. The show treats art as a way of being, shaped by imagery rooted in intuition and dreams and carried into physical form through sustained attention to process. In a climate of constant noise and unrest, the works lean toward beauty, curiosity, and play. Curator and artist Saul Chernick tells us more about the exhibition and the venue.

March 10, 2026March 9, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Narratives and expressive figures in Judy Glantzman’s Playing with Dolls at P.P.O.W

Glantzman’s heroically scaled works immerse viewers in the energetic world that she creates. I really appreciate the diversity in scale of the works in this show. The smaller-sized canvases offer a snapshot, still detailed but a more compact telling of the world she is creating. Whereas the larger works allow viewers to step in and entangle themselves within the forms, narratives, symbols, and ideas that Glantzman offers. Walking into the gallery brought an immediate sense of excitement, wonder, and a need for exploration and adventure within the pieces. The paintings introduce the characters and scenes, while the ceramics are the pieces Glantzman chooses to pluck directly from the compositions and bring into 3D forms.

March 9, 2026March 7, 2026, by Deborah Wasserman

Qiu Xiaofei: The Theater of Wither and Thrive at Hauser & Wirth

At first glance, Qiu Xiaofei’s paintings appear weightless, washed in vaporous blues and fractured light. They hover between memory and dream, suspended in a luminous haze. But sustained looking alters the experience. The mist does not dissolve — it thickens. What seemed ethereal becomes anatomical. The viewer descends from the sky into the soil, and then further still into the ruptured systems, broken bodies, and unstable architectures that structure human existence. Beneath the atmospheric softness lies something closer to the bowels of what we call life: exposed nerves of paint, skeletal fragments, windows that stare back like watchful eyes. The work stages, narrates, and exposes modes of excavation.

March 2, 2026March 20, 2026, by Mer Mora

Cathleen Clarke: The Past Won’t Stay Put at Margot Samel

It had just rained in New York City when the smell of wet grass and pine in Central Park transported me somewhere else entirely: back in my hometown, a place I hadn’t lived in for a decade. I could’ve sworn I heard the same birds I woke up to every morning. The reminiscence was completely involuntary, but for a few seconds, I found myself caught inside an instant that felt like a different lifetime. This is the feeling that Episodes, Cathleen Clarke’s new exhibitionat Margot Samel, creates. There is no nostalgia or comfort, but instead, the disorienting realization that the past has intruded on the present uninvited.

February 24, 2026February 23, 2026, by Ella Jackson

Lacey McKinney: Where Bodies Blur

Born and raised in New York, Lacey McKinney is a New York-based fine artist whose work explores the tensions between interspecies dynamics, gender and ecology, the paradox of life and death, and bodily transformation and decay. Having exhibited nationally, received major grants such as the NYFA/NYSCA Project Grant, and completed residencies including the McColl Center, McKinney’s practice continues to evolve. Her work meditates on the complexities of existence, as self and in relation to others, unraveling the differences that separate us, and highlighting the interdependence entangled within all species, ecosystems, and identities.

McKinney’s gestural material application and stylistic dynamism merge, meld, reconfigure, and transform figures, flora, and fauna, creating liminal compositions that blur where form begins and ends. Her pigments and paints examine the relationship between predator and prey, a relationship that, though antagonistic, still relies on reciprocity to survive. Insides become outsides, differences become diffused, and touch becomes transformative.

February 16, 2026February 16, 2026, by Stephen Wozniak

The Writing on the Wall: Becky Brown’s Pleasure Reading at Freight + Volume

Language is having a moment—again—but it no longer behaves as it once did. Words now arrive compressed, automated, endlessly replicated, stripped of duration even as they multiply. Becky Brown has been tracking this condition for years, painting language not as message but as environment: something we live inside, skim through, and increasingly struggle to feel.

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.

December 3, 2025December 6, 2025, by Peter Schroth

Tom McGlynn: This Here at Rick Wester Fine Art

Tom McGlynn, *This Here*, installation view, Rick Wester Fine Art, New York

Tom McGlynn continues to grow a decade-long train of thought with a new selection of paintings in This Here at Rick Wester Fine Art. Consistent with his oeuvre, he arrays a selection of color rectangles suspended within various fields of color. An acquaintanceship with the origin of this direction, accompanied by a fresh pair of eyes, will enable a viewer to put aside the parallels with Mondrian, Albers, or even Hans Hoffmann, and see these works anew.

November 17, 2025December 1, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Fran Shalom: Everyday Improvisations at Kathryn Markel

Fran Shalom’s paintings reduce form to its essentials while preserving the marks of revision and doubt. The surface becomes a record of both decision and hesitation, clarity and its undoing. Her compositions are direct yet ambivalent. Airy lines float within vivid color fields, their edges both firm and uncertain, altogether suggesting a state of being through color, motion, and gesture rather than representation. They obstinately remain abstract, teasing recognition without granting it.

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.