plein air painting – Art Spiel

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.

May 4, 2026May 4, 2026, by Etty Yaniv

Yuyo- Julián Kreimer at the Sarah Lawrence Heimbold Visual Arts Center

Before his artist talk, Julián Kreimer set a small brown valise on the table and opened it. Inside, folders held drawings on paper, each made in response to a photographic slide from his parents’ archive. The valise was not part of the exhibition; it was the working material behind it, a private archive he had been drawing through for years. Encountering it set the terms for the room next door: Yuyo is what happens when that interior is opened out.

April 8, 2026April 7, 2026, by Taylor Bielecki

Eric Wolf’s Two Waters: Nature, Observation, and Exploration at Abri Mars

Eric Wolf’s works at Abri Mars take us through misty, expansive landscapes. Their ethereality and tranquility pull viewers into new places to explore and settle into. Within Two Waters, Wolf recreates the landscapes he observes directly, using a limited ink palette to bring the pieces to life. Through a combination of controlled and reactive strokes, Wolf uses hard and soft edges to render his figures of nature. While the figures are more abstract- mountains, bodies of water, trees, etc, these works are expanding on the process of plein air, bringing the environment into the works directly. With the gallery’s natural light from the front windows, the darkness of the ink becomes velvety, drawing you in, while the light of the paper glows beneath, pushing outward. This push and pull makes the work feel dynamic and lively.

April 19, 2025April 19, 2025, by Andrew Fish

Art Spiel Picks: Boston Exhibitions April 2025

Highlights

*If They Told You, Would You Listen?* at Thayer Academy, Braintree, MA

Spring has sprung and many beautiful exhibitions are in full bloom across the city of Boston. Several exhibitions celebrating fiber art are on view along with multiple shows that highlight the season of rebirth. One of my favorite things about Spring in New England is seeing the trees awake from their dormancy and plants sprouting from the earth. The area thaws out and inspires a creative push toward summer. This means a lot of play, or spiel, for artists who experiment with unconventional materials and new media. This is wonderfully evident in the work on view this month as artists and galleries display playful and profound creations for a new season. Here’s some Art Spiel for you.

February 7, 2022November 2, 2022, by Art Spiel

Ellen Kozak – Vigil

Featured Artist

*Gallery View. Photo courtesy of David Richard Gallery*

Vigil, Ellen Kozak’s first solo painting exhibition with David Richard Gallery, featured two fully realized series of abstract oil paintings on panel. The painter, with studios in New York City and beside the Hudson River in Greene County, explores the relationship between the fluidity of paint and river surfaces affected by the intersection of natural and manmade phenomena. Altogether the paintings activated the gallery space into a cohesive site-responsive installation.

August 2, 2021August 2, 2021, by Etty Yaniv

Polly Shindler: Place on Material

The artist in her studio at The Wassaic Project, 2020, photo by Luis Mejicanos

In her paintings CT based painter Polly Shindler takes a close look at lived-in spaces – interiors with furniture of different periods, textiles with colorful patterns, flooring with different textures. Here spaces are typically void of people and at the same time breath with a sense of human occupancy.

March 25, 2020July 10, 2020, by Etty Yaniv

Valeri Larko – Sign of the Times at Lyons Wier

Valeri Larko in dialogue with Art Spiel

:In the Beginning on site in the Bronx for Art Spiel.jpg — Valeri Larko, “In the Beginning” on site in the Bronx, 2019, oil/canvas, 30” x 24” Courtesy of Lyons Wier Gallery

Valeri Larko’s paintings in Sign of the Times, her solo exhibition at Lyons Wier Gallery depict urban environments at the fringes, where motels past their time, colossal billboards with bombastic one liners, neglected industrial buildings, and dead trees pepper the landscape. The imagery is familiar yet uncanny. Valeri Larko shares with Art Spiel on the body of work in this show, what draws her to this landscape painting, and how she approaches her painting on-site. Due to the Coronavirus pandemic the show is available online but the physical exhibition has been postponed.