painting – Art Spiel

October 22, 2026October 22, 2026, by Xuezhu Jenny Wang

Meet at the Ferris Wheel: Kathleen Beausoleil’s Plein Air Paintings Combine Psychology and Light

Painter Kathleen Beausoleil is enamored by her backyard, literally. The fair grounds and beaches that are synonymous to her home state, New Jersey, form her primary subjects. Visiting local fairgrounds each summer, she paints plein air, out in the open, and on view in her latest solo show at The Painting Center are works that beautifully capture the light, vibrancy, and togetherness of these places. After speaking with the artist, I understand that Beausoleil’s scenes are not only advanced in their painterly technique, but created through perspectives cleverly scaffolded by sociological terms around gathering and group behaviour.

October 21, 2026October 21, 2026, by Art Spiel

Paul Fägerskiöld’s Expanding Fields

Paul Fägerskiöld, New York. July 1, 3586. View south towards the black hole Gaia BH1 (1,560 light years).

The first painting in Paul Fägerskiöld’s solo exhibition Ergosphere, at Peter Blum Gallery, offers a modest entrance into an immeasurable subject. A small, dark blue field scattered with points of light initially suggests what could be an image taken by NASA of deep space. Its title establishes an improbably precise appointment: New York. July 1, 3586. View south towards the black hole Gaia BH1 (1,560 light-years). We have a location, a direction, and a date. Whether these coordinates help us find our bearings is another matter.

October 19, 2026October 19, 2026, by Peter Schroth

James Esber’s, My Thing, Your Thing, and the Thing Itself

James Esber’s paintings are inherently punchy, with a bold, fluoro-pop palette and active surfaces. In My Thing, Your Thing, and the Thing Itself at Satchel Projects, it is compounded by the intimate quarters as well as the scale of the works, most roughly the size of the average viewer. One can pivot in place and take in the entire exhibit with a quick rotation that may trigger a rush of associations, from Hairy Who Chicago to Ed Roth “Weirdo,” et al. It can take a moment to pause, regard each work in turn, and register the artist’s point of view.

October 15, 2026October 15, 2026, by Claire Haik

Two Shows in Dialogue: A Conversation with Tatyana Kazakova and Anna Shukeylo

New Jersey’s Watchung Arts Center brings together two distinct solo exhibitions: Entropic Flora by Anna Shukeylo and Symphony for the Unnoticed by Tatyana Kazakova. Both artists weave between abstraction and realism to create intimate portraits of nature, but their styles and vantage points diverge in dynamic ways. Kazakova fills the sprawling upstairs gallery with large drawings and paintings that pack the space with thickets, foliage, and tangled old growth, inviting viewers to contemplate the boundaries between wild spaces. In the lower gallery, Shukeylo’s compositions erupt with vibrant gestural brushmarks that capture fleeting moments of blooming flowers at their peak splendor. In this conversation, Kazakova and Shukeylo discuss their work, studio practices, and thematic vantage points, revealing the very different paths they take to create their images of nature.

October 14, 2026October 13, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Call Mom: Olive Ayhens and Ezra Johnson at Bookstein Projects

Olive Ayhens and Ezra Johnson, installation view at Bookstein Projects

Pairing artists with assorted bodies of work spanning over a decade is not an easy task. In the current two-person exhibition at Bookstein Projects, it helps that each artist, regardless of subject matter, has a distinct approach to color and composition. And then, there is a story. Call Mom features paintings on canvas and paper by mother and son Olive Ayhens and Ezra Johnson. The family tie is a good cue for the curator and for us. Yet it may be more interesting to set aside the biography for a moment and, as you enter, experience the vibrant visual dialogue unfolding between two painters.

October 14, 2026October 13, 2026, by Yueliu Huang

Beautifully Fall Apart

Installation view of After Throwing, featuring works by Yuqian He.

Women constantly fall, from rule, from discourse, from childbirth, from ecstasy, from sacrifice, from love, from anguish. We are still in the place of repeatedly coalescing to regain voice and visibility across political, economic, pedagogical, and creative fields. Comprehending it through cultural theorist and sociologist Angela McRobbie, we see that women are made to bear greater precarity, conditioned by institutions, by discourse, by an economy that asks for passion in place of pay; entering the creative fields comes with a demand to be self-managing, enterprising and unquestioningly cheerful about it. Women might be naturally leading the creative sector but meanwhile, fall heavily onto body, conditions and time, carrying its costs behind the facade of the neoliberal art industry.

October 7, 2026October 1, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Plumb Line: Irit Baniel and Alexis Granwell at Medium Rare

Medium Rare Project Space in DUMBO opens the season with Plumb Line, a two-person show pairing Irit Baniel’s paintings with Alexis Granwell’s sculptures. The two artists work with different materials and processes, but their work shares a concern with the body, vulnerability, memory, and grief. Medium Rare is an artist-led space rooted in making, looking and conversation. Surrounded by artists and studios, it has close ties to the Brooklyn art community and uses exhibitions, talks and workshops to connect artists with a wider public. In this conversation, co-founder Narelle Sissons discusses the curatorial process, the visual axis linking the two artists, the venue’s origins, and its plans for the year ahead.

October 6, 2026October 2, 2026, by Gail Winbury

The Prime of Your Life at Marc Straus

Francis Barth, Bridging, 2024, Acrylic on canvas, 30” x 40”, photo courtesy of Marc Straus Gallery

Aging is a paradox. Wisdom and clarity of purpose increase, while deterioration and physical impairments begin to ravage the body. The exhibition and panel, The Prime of Your Life, at Marc Straus Gallery, exemplifies that dichotomy, bringing to bear aging female artists’ dilemmas while celebrating their enduring passion, talent, and productivity.

October 2, 2026October 1, 2026, by Sherly Fan

This Candy Has Teeth: Can Nostalgia Really Comfort Us?

This Candy Has Teeth, curated by Shuhan Zhang, 2026, image Courtesy of Weicang Wang

Is nostalgia really a safe space for us to process the uncertainty of the rapidly changing present? This Candy Has Teeth, curated by Shuhan Zhang, features five Chinese artists, Shengjie Jiang, Weican Wang, Jiaqi Mao, Yukun (Chloe) Ba, and Cindy (Zhaoyue) Chen, who move through childhood, memory, and nostalgia in different ways. Together, their works reflect our current desire for nostalgia, a desire that perhaps reveals just how uncertain the present feels. Yet the more we try to grasp onto the soft, safe, familiar places of the past, the more complicated those memories become. If you really delve back into them, they are also full of discomfort: moments of being forced to accept what happened, and the stiffness of a choke at the throat. As the curatorial text suggests, it is a “sensory misalignment”—an apple is sweet, yet hard to swallow.

September 30, 2026October 10, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

SPRING/BREAK highlights: Hide and Seek

This year’s theme for SPRING/BREAK Art Show was Hide and Seek. The fair was within this new and exciting office space that felt like a labyrinth at first, but then it evolved into a wonderful journey- meeting new artists and old friends. Full of amazing works and installations, the booths caught my attention through either a detail, a connection, or a wonderful conversation. The themes varied, from Peter Gynd’s focus on the joys of the everyday to Juan-Manuel Pinzon and Matthew Logsdon’s connections through material, action, and discovery. David Howe and Jesus Benavente’s team brings urgency and humor, showing how decisions from up high affect our everyday lives. My experience of the fair concluded with the works of Noa Charuvi and Shmuel Charuvi, exploring connections to a sense of place and ways of viewing the world, often influenced by the works of family, while Braden Bandel’s paintings and drawings bring us into another world entirely- allowing us a place to rest and contemplate.