pattern – Art Spiel

July 10, 2025July 10, 2025, by Rory Martin

Naomi Okubo: Resonance on a Surface at Fou Gallery

A painting on a wall

AI-generated content may be incorrect. — Installation image of Naomi Okubo: Resonance on a Surface, 2025. Photograph by Ken Lee

When Naomi Okubo decides to begin working on one of her enthralling paintings, there is a multistep process that far proceeds the brush gracing the canvas. The careful preparation of materials, digital and physical, allow Okubo to consolidate her thoughts and produce an organic depiction of her personal experience. The authenticity with which this is depicted is a result of the forethought and boundless introspection that she imposes upon herself. It is important to note that the artworks selected for the exhibition Naomi Okubo: Resonance on a Surface currently on view at Fou Gallery, weave a narrative fabric that chronologizes Okubo’s development as a visual artist.

January 23, 2025January 30, 2025, by Will Kaplan

Prayer / Pattern / Prayer at Morgan Lehman

Installation view of Prayer / Pattern / Prayer

Prayer / Pattern / Prayer at Morgan Lehman offers a mesmerizing view of patterns as a deeply seated human instinct. Fittingly, a radial symmetry unfolds from the vertex of the L-shaped room. Yet curator Jan Dickey balances this evenness with a syncopated rhythm of paired artworks and bold standalone pieces. In creating a pattern of patterns, this show offers a metonymic view of artists running with different strands from the fabric of a species-wide impulse toward order and adornment.

July 25, 2024July 24, 2024, by Art Spiel

Intimate Space, Entangling Threads – Sharon Liu and Hanna Hirakawa with Naomi Okubo

In Conversation

Naomi Okubo, *Little Mama – Closely Glazed Space*, 2024, acrylic on canvas, ©Naomi Okubo, courtesy of Fou Gallery

Naomi Okubo has been creating works that explore the themes of identity and relationships with others. Her paintings, sculptures, and installations often feature multiple portraits of herself in imaginary, fantasized settings full of decorative patterns and vibrant colors that blur the boundary between the self and the surrounding environment. This ambiguity regarding identity stems from her experiences of struggling to establish selfhood in relation to others during her adolescence. One of her turning points was when she developed her interest in Wardian cases or what she calls “closely glazed spaces.”

June 4, 2024June 5, 2024, by Yasmeen Abdallah

Yasmeen’s Picks for June

Closing this week

Textures of Feminist Perseverance at James Gallery CUNY Graduate Center.

Poignant moments of reflection burst from the seams in this week’s roundup of not-to-miss exhibitions across Manhattan. Exuberance, symmetry, and swathes of color bathe viewers in myriad ways through these must-see shows across New York City.

April 17, 2023April 10, 2023, by Art Spiel

Liz Collins in DUMBO Open Studios

Featured Artist

Liz Collins in her studio. Photo by Joe Kramm.

Each spring over 100 artists and art organizations in DUMBO And Vinegar Hill open their studio doors to the public for a weekend. This year the event takes place on April 22 and 23 from 1 to 6 PM. Art Spiel created a Mixed Media Guide for this event in addition to other curated guides on the Art In Dumbo website here. In conjunction with the event Art Spiel conducted a few interviews with individual participating artists. This one is with Liz Collins whose multi- faceted art includes textiles, drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation.

February 15, 2021February 15, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Greg Drasler: Crowded Places / Open Spaces at Betty Cuningham Gallery

In Dialogue with Greg Drasler

Crowded Places / Open Spaces installation Betty Cuningham Gallery

Greg Drasler came to be a metaphorical figurative painter when he lost everything he owned in a fire in 1978, except for two paintings. At that moment he decided to focus exclusively on painting — he was a painter and painting would be everything he needed. He began to rebuild his pictorial world with scenes from the self-help DIY magazines and for over 40 years has continued to explore and expand his visual vocabulary through several bodies of work. Greg Drasler says he identifies with the subjects of his paintings “as personal questions, metaphors, and allegories often responding to social and cultural topics.” His current solo exhibition at Betty Cuningham Gallery includes both works from his lengthiest series, the Hats Paintings, and some from his most recent series, the Road House paintings. Sparked by the effects of social distancing due to the pandemic, the paintings overall assume another layer of meaning.

April 18, 2020April 16, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Artists on Coping: Liz Jaff

During the Coronavirus pandemic, Art Spiel is reaching out to artists to learn how they are coping.

Liz Jaff creates installations, objects, outdoor interventions and drawings using formal structures, pattern and repetition to talk about permanence and impermanence, perceptions of time and the role of memory in shaping experience. Poetry, storytelling, Flamenco, Butoh theater and personal narrative are important influences. She lives and works in New York City.

February 10, 2020November 15, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Kit Warren – Moments of Recognition

*Altered States (untitled),* 2019, Acrylic, flashe on birch panel, 36 x 36 inches, photo courtesy the artist

Kit Warren‘s works on paper present complex and elaborate visual cryptography – patterns of lines, dots, and bold colorful shapes. They evoke layered associations ranging from microcosmic to cosmic. Kit Warren shares with Art Spiel some of her ideas and work process.

January 22, 2019May 6, 2019, by Etty Yaniv

Elisabeth Condon – Responding to Contingency

Elisabeth Condon, Plant Life, 2018, ink, acrylic on parchment, 144 x 32, photo Jim Reiman

Elisabeth Condon is a traveler in life and art. Her large scale scrolls, installations, and paintings entice the viewer to join her in adventurous excursions of new and imaginative landscapes. The artist’s innate sensibility for color, pattern, and form, ignited by an insatiable curiosity for cultural intersections, have resulted in an outstanding body of work. For Art Spiel, Elisabeth Condon sheds some light on her dynamic mode of visual quest, and on-going projects.

October 18, 2018December 6, 2024, by Etty Yaniv

David Samuel Stern’s Portraits: The Mechanics of Longing

For photographer David Samuel Stern’s photography typically serves as a departure point for crafting tangible objects. In his Woven Portraits series for instance, Stern physically assembles pieces of his photographic portraits into new forms, aiming to fuse the notion of photographic representation with its own material nature, making a new essence. The imagery in this series may bring to mind Cubists’ and Futurists’ paintings, or David Hockney’s Polaroids, but in Stern’s hybrid artworks, the imagery derives from a photographer’s imagination and can be distinctly traced to our digital age – the manual counterpoints the virtual. Here Stern shares with Art Spiel some of his ideas, process, and projects.

Aaron; 2015; Photographic prints on archival translucent vellum, physically cut and woven together; 40 x 31 x ¼ in, 101.5 x 78.75 x 1.25 cm; Courtesy David Samuel Stern

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