gestural painting – Art Spiel

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.

October 6, 2025October 9, 2025, by Hovey Brock

Ashley Garrett: Psyche at September

*Welling,* 2025, oil on canvas, 65” x 115”

Psyche, Ashley Garrett’s exhibition of paintings at September Gallery in Kinderhook, has a mix of large and small oil paintings, and pastels. The small works have a restless energy emphasized by Garrett’s staccato mark-making. The large canvases give Garrett’s brush plenty of room to deliver longer, more fluid gestures. This freedom allows her paint strokes to slide over and under each other in a flow that can give her compositions a quiet intensity, like tall grass seething in a high wind. Garrett has lightened up her palette to include more pinks and a range of whites and pale grays.

September 16, 2025September 14, 2025, by Anna Shukeylo

Painters to Watch: The Armory Show 2025 Recap

Installation View, Doron Lanberg at Victoria Miro, courtesy of the writer

With the excitement of the art fairs behind us it’s time to take one look back at The Armory Show and note a couple artists to watch this year who clearly stood out in the whirlwind of that weekend.

August 28, 2025August 31, 2025, by Taylor Bielecki

MIST – Fleeting moments and Summer Sensibilities at Helm Contemporary

Installation view, Sylvia Schwartz, *Temperature Gauge and Word Landscape and Green, photo courtesy of Helm Contemporary*

In MIST, four artists are brought together to take the inspiration of summer, and find a way to break through the heatwaves that have recently hit New York. There is a dialogue between the artists and their various takes on works on paper, bringing forth summer sensibilities, airiness, freshness, and a feeling of being free. Each artist offers a different series of works.

August 19, 2025August 19, 2025, by Stephen Wozniak

Jonathan Syme Coaxes Spirit from Matter at Royale Projects

*Jonathan Syme, Receding, Shy Daylight, 2024, oil on canvas in artist frame, 43” x 37”. Courtesy of Royale Projects*

Jonathan Syme paints like someone coaxing spirit from matter—a phrase that sounds mystical until you’re standing in front of the work, where it becomes simply descriptive. As restless as they seem, his canvases don’t argue or perform; they resonate, like a vibration passed through the soles of your feet. Thick skeins of paint are unearthed, revealing strata in a geologic dig of intuition. There’s a kind of archaeology to the gesture: gouges, stains, and eruptions of impasto build a type of sedimentary record, chronicling attention. The eye slows down, and with it, thought.

June 9, 2025June 6, 2025, by Anna Shukeylo

Judith Simonian: The Human Element Huddled and Still

Installation View. Courtesy of JJMurphy Gallery

Judith Simonian’s solo show at JJ Murphy Gallery, poignantly titled The Human Element, Huddled and Still, features her latest paintings from the past few years. At first glance, there is familiarity in each piece – a living room, a still life, part of a ship – but as one starts to look closer, something starts to happen. Within each painting, there is a portal into another world; there are clashing planes and changing scenes that are so seamlessly blended together the viewer’s brain needs some time to catch up. What is particularly astounding about Simonian’s work is that her subject matter is a humble amalgamation of scenes, spaces, and objects one would encounter in everyday life.

May 7, 2025May 7, 2025, by Riad Miah

Cosmic Sentiment and Sculptural Gesture: Jai Hart and Kelly Worman at Freight + Volume

Jai Hart, Finding Harmony from the Neckline to My Right Heel, 2025, Acrylic on canvas and poly-fill, 72h x 41w in

When I first heard about the pairing of Jai Hart and Kelly Worman in a two-person show at Freight + Volume, I was puzzled. Their formal vocabularies appeared too distinct, too dissonant. But upon entering the exhibition, my skepticism dissolved. Their differences are not discordant—they are dialectical. Both artists, working through abstraction and form, propose modes of seeing and making that are sensitive, inquisitive, and quietly defiant. While their materials and gestures diverge, Hart and Worman converge in a feminist-postmodern sensibility that challenges the hegemonic logics of painting, and, more subtly, the gendered histories that underpin it.

March 13, 2025March 12, 2025, by Etty Yaniv

Barbara Friedman’s All Rude and Lumpy Matter at Frosch&Co

Installation view. Photo courtesy of Barbara Friedman

Barbara Friedman’s first solo exhibition at FROSCH&CO presents commanding paintings—unsettling, visceral, and electric—resembling a Rorschach test on acid. Poured paint mutates into shifting forms: eyes, rabbit ears, chicken legs. The grotesque, the horrific, the sublime, and the comical coexist, each intensifying the other.

December 30, 2024January 7, 2025, by Riad Miah

Abstraction by Any Other Name at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation

View fullsize — Installation of Abstraction By Any Other Name, Part I. Photo courtesy of Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York

The exhibition Abstraction by Any Other Name, curated by Dan Cameron at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, celebrates the diverse approaches to abstract painting among eight contemporary artists: Jane Fine, Matthew Kolodziej, Regina Scully, Lui Shtini, Louise Belcourt, Iva Gueorguieva, Jill Moser, and Frank Owen. The show, running from September 6, 2024, to February 8, 2025, is presented in two parts, each highlighting different artists.