painting – Page 3

July 6, 2026July 6, 2026, by Shuhan Zhang

Growing After the Embers: A Review of Bùi Thanh Tâm’s Solo Exhibition Here on and after

For a long time, when I was young, I felt distant from the idea of “history.” In textbooks, history always appeared through years, wars, reforms, and changes of political power, as if it were made of events already organized and settled. Yet the history that truly remains in the body often appears in more hidden forms. It may be a silence within family narratives, a memory that one generation chooses to avoid, a recurring pattern in festive images, or a color that seems joyful while quietly carrying a wound. Very often, history continues to exist in another form, lingering in images, bodies, and everyday experience.

June 29, 2026June 28, 2026, by Eva Zanardi

The Biennale That Broke Itself

The 61st International Art Exhibition arrives in grief, political fury, and institutional crisis. It is one of the more galvanizing editions in recent memory.

The lagoon light still flatters everything it touches, but this year, Venice has the feel of a city that stayed up too late arguing. May 7, 2026 — the one morning of the press preview period spared by both rain and protest — was the kind of day Venice is famous for: blue sky and large cinematic cumuli drifting above the Queen of the Adriatic. Police stood watch outside the Israeli and Russian pavilions. The queues at the Giardini were long; those at the Arsenale were longer. In years of attending press previews, I have rarely encountered such a congested or physically demanding environment — the crowd, indistinguishable from a general-public opening, consumed by the compulsive and indiscriminate act of photographing everything in sight.

June 25, 2026June 25, 2026, by Melissa Stern

Women Across America 1945-1979 at Eric Firestone

Eric Firestone Gallery, in its continuing support of underrepresented and female artists in the 20th and 21st centuries, has mounted an ambitious and interesting exhibition on now through July 11 at the gallery’s location on Great Jones Street in NYC. The exhibition is devoted to women who worked in abstraction from 1945 to 1979, thus giving the curators a very specific window within which to work.

June 23, 2026July 15, 2026, by Art Spiel

What Remains: in dialogue with Arghavan Khosravi

Altarpieces—historically sites of devotion, revelation, and spiritual certainty—become something altogether different in Arghavan Khosravi’s What Remains, currently on view at Uffner & Liu through July 2. The exhibition brings together large-scale wall works, a freestanding sculpture, and an intimate suite of new altar-inspired paintings that continue Khosravi’s ongoing exploration of the forces that shape women’s lives under political, cultural, and religious systems of control. Drawing equally from Persian miniature painting and medieval European iconography, the artist constructs layered worlds where architectural structures become psychological spaces, symbols migrate across histories, and moments of resistance emerge within conditions of constraint. Rather than offering resolution, the works linger in states of suspension—between freedom and captivity, memory and displacement, devotion and doubt.

June 19, 2026September 2, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Pouch Power Women: with Brenda Zlamany

Installation view, Seven Women Chase Icebergs, The Re Institute

What starts as an open call and a group text to trusted friends becomes, two years later, an exhibition that feels inevitable. Seven Women Chase Icebergs, on view at The Re Institute in Millerton, NY, brings together seven painters whose friendships span decades and continents: Rome, Skowhegan, Triangle, Braziers. Organized by Brooklyn-based artist Brenda Zlamany — creator of The Itinerant Portraitist and a painter whose practice has long centered on community as both subject and method — the show grew from a month-long residency at Pouch Cove, Newfoundland, where the group painted, hiked, shared meals, and chased icebergs along the edge of the Atlantic. We spoke with Zlamany about friendship as curatorial logic, landscape as psychological mirror, and what it means to build something together at the edge of the world.

June 17, 2026June 18, 2026, by Laurie Gwen Shapiro

Well, Hell. Beautiful. Mary Shah and Rachael Wren at Rick Wester Fine Art

No one was supposed to say “beautiful.” Oh God, no. Not in the mid-1990s art scene I knew, when I worked at a then-trendy, high-gloss art magazine and beauty had all the social standing of a shrimp cocktail at a theory seminar. Beauty was too easy and too ready to come in smiling and ruin everyone’s severe little mood. A serious work could resist you from across the room. But beautiful? Beautiful was what your aunt said when she had run out of things to say.

Then I walked into Mary Shah and Rachael Wren’s In the Ecstasy of the Sun at Rick Wester Fine Art and thought: well, hell. Beautiful.

June 11, 2026June 10, 2026, by Michal Gavish

Voices In Minor Keys: 2026 Venice Biennale

In Minor Keys, the central exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale, arrived with a quiet proposition. The late curator Koyo Kouho envisioned a show that reflects practices requiring time and sustained commitment — some of them lifetime, even generational — and in doing so created a deliberate antithesis to the Biennale spectacle. Drawing almost exclusively on artists from Africa, the Middle East, and the Caribbean, the exhibition is anchored in political concerns — identity, immigration, the environment — yet so many of the works felt personal, while reaching toward art history and even toward Venice itself. What follows is an account of its visual depth and strength.

May 28, 2026May 28, 2026, by Yasmeen Abdallah

It Takes a Village at Freight and Volume

The most subtle acts are often the most cathartic. In times of relentless upheaval and injustice, simple moments can feel Herculean by measure. The current exhibition at Freight and Volume, It Takes A Village, focuses on daily ritual as a gate of entry. Artists Andrea Castillo, Nancy Elsamanoudi, and Baran Shafiey blend nuanced elements with doses of surreality, resulting in invitations into spaces that delightfully offer more questions than answers. Each work is a reckoning with the quietude of in-betweenness. Each artist is a painter working in figuration; yet the similarities end there, and the departures are as varied as one can imagine.

May 25, 2026May 27, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Daniel Wiener at Satchel Projects: Out in front of the back of beyond

Out in Front of the Back of Beyond, the title of Daniel Wiener’s current solo exhibition at Satchel Projects, is a perfect pitch for the work on view. The notion of “front and back” strikes a strong chord throughout — explicit in the freestanding sculptures, hinted at in the wall pieces.

April 27, 2026April 26, 2026, by Eva Zanardi

How Malta Biennale 2026 Reimagines Site-Specificity

One is never prepared for the Maltese archipelago and its vertiginous dichotomy of antiquity and modernity; an exhilarating compound of ethnicities, languages, and cultures. Though one might consider it diminutive, during the three-day press preview, I traversed the main island, Malta, and its quieter, more pastoral and bucolic sister island, Gozo, in a flurry of taxis, ferries, and buses. (Comino, a nature lover’s sanctuary, remains largely uninhabited.) Malta occupies a distinctly liminal position within the Mediterranean world: a central island shaped across centuries by exchanges among Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. Situated a mere 60 miles south of Sicily and roughly an hour’s flight from Tunis, it has long functioned as a site of passage, encounter, and cultural layering—a geographic palimpsest upon which successive civilizations have inscribed themselves again and again.