February 12 – April 18, 2026 Reception: Thursday, February 12th, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Qiu Xiaofei presents new oil paintings and works on paper inspired by previously unknown family photographs discovered after his father’s passing. From this intimate source, the exhibition expands into a meditation on memory, loss, and the world’s unstable transformations. Informed by Chinese philosophical traditions and Western poets such as Robert Lowell and Emily Dickinson, Qiu creates vivid, dreamlike scenes in which presence and absence unfold across psychological landscapes. Rooted in family history and his hometown of Harbin, his paintings merge abandoned architecture, nature, and imagination. Recurring spiral motifs evoke non-linear time, while layered imagery bridges personal remembrance with broader historical and emotional experience.
New York City loves a label the way it loves a line outside a new restaurant: there is the promise of significance and the reassurance that someone else has already decided what matters. The label flatters, then quietly ends the conversation. The oil painter Rifka Milder’s work refuses that bargain. Call her a “downtown painter,” and you’re not wrong, but her new solo show at Helm Contemporary, GREAT JONES, is what happens when someone who actually grew up downtown, in a household run on paint and argument, makes abstraction that declines to become neighborhood branding. Art in America once called her “an oil painter’s painter.”
In 2019, an art acquisition trip brought curator Lan Shi from Beijing to New York. When the pandemic extended her stay, she shifted her focus and began working as a full-time freelance curator and art agent. Since then, she has organized more than a dozen exhibitions of varying scale, including her current project with artist Jeffrey Morabito.
Emily Sundblad, The Adolescent Ocean, installation view, Bortolami, New York, 2025
A person who can sit through a Survey of Art lecture set to a Leonard Cohen soundtrack while reading The Waves may be well equipped to navigate Emily Sundblad’s Adolescent Ocean. Personal history intermingles with cultural and art iconography, forming a tide of debris that floats to the surface in this show of collage-like, collective memory-dreams.
Installation view with Naomi Lev at The Space Between Knowing exhibition at The TL Studio. Photographed by Argenis Apolinario. Left (top to bottom): Shony Rivnay, The Loss of Innocence Squared, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 43.3 x 43.3 inch; Shony Rivnay, Keep Movin’, 2023, Acrylic on canvas, 43.3 x 43.3 inch. Right: Shony Rivnay, Initiation of Movement No.1, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 61 x 77 inch.
Naomi Lev is a curator, cultural program director, and arts writer based in New York City. She works closely with living artists and calls her approach “Process Curating”—a method that follows a project from its earliest stages through final installation. It’s about long-term exchange and staying present as ideas shift.
Mark Dagley and Lauri Bortz of the Abaton Project Room
Mark Dagley is an artist who has exhibited his paintings and sculptures, which explore the intersection of abstraction and materiality, in New York and Europe since the 1980s. Lauri Bortz is a playwright and author whose farcical tragedies have been performed in theaters in New York, and over the past decade, she has created a series of children’s books. Abaton Project Room, or APR, is a temporary exhibition space conceived by Lauri, located at 11 Broadway, in the historic Bowling Green Office Building in Lower Manhattan. Over a one-year period (August 2024-2025), APR is alternating monthly presentations of Mark Dagley’s work—paintings, sculpture, and works on paper—with thematic group exhibitions as well as selections from Mark and Lauri’s personal collection.
Nancy Baker, Pretty Circles, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 48 x 48 inches
Night Shades, a new exhibition presented by daphne:art Gallery and Advisory in collaboration with ODETTA, brings together three artists—Nancy Baker, Claire Seidl, and Geoffrey Parker—whose paintings and photographs explore the uneasy edge between perception and memory, hinting at alternative realities, and brushing against dystopia.
The two-person show of luminous abstract wall works at Atlantic Gallery offers viewers a dynamic sensory experience where light, shadow and unexpected materials form a conversation about how we see and engage with the world.
Installation view of Dance the Distance in Atlantic Gallery, 2025
Dance the Distance: Anne Berlit and Michele Foyer at Atlantic Gallery. Curated by Suzan Shutan. It runs through March 23, 2025
Peter Gynd, Figures which do not behave within the structure of a Story, 2023, oil on linen, 48 x 36 inches
10989 Dunlop Road features Peter Gynd’s recent oil paintings, inspired by the tranquil garden of his mother’s home in kwekwenis (Lang Bay), British Columbia. This series captures the shifting essence of cedar and fir trees that stand at the garden’s entrance, embodying themes of rebirth and spiritual renewal. Each painting serves as a reflection of Gynd’s connection to this place of refuge during a pivotal time.
In Hamas’ destruction of Kibbutz Be’eri, the terrorists also came for curator Sofie Berzon MacKie and her family. They survived, but the kibbutz’s gallery was burned to the ground
Osnat Ben Dov’s exhibition “Shadow of a Passing Bird” at Kibbutz Be’eri, before the attack.Credit: Michal Revivo
This article by Gilad Melzer for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz was published in Haaretz English version on November 2, 2023.
On Friday October 6, Sofie Berzon MacKie, the curator of Kibbutz Be’eri’s gallery, was busy preparing herself for a long day at work the following morning. She knew that Saturday was the last day of a week-long Sukkot holiday, and hoped that visitors would throng to the current exhibition shown at the gallery, “Shadow of a Passing Bird,” by photographer Osnat Ben Dov.
