Jun 122025
 

This mural was created in 2019 by Tomokazu “Matzu” Matsuyama as a commission for The Houston Bowery Wall in NYC.

Matsuyama recently completed the painting Morning Sun Dance, inspired by Edward Hopper’s 1952 painting, Morning Sun. An exhibition of his paintings and works on paper centered around this new work opens at Edward Hopper House Museum in Nyack, New York, on Friday, 6/20/25.

From the museum about the exhibition-

The exhibition centers around Matsu’s new large-scale painting Morning Sun Dance. Of the work that inspired his painting, Matsu says, “While Hopper’s Morning Sun captures a moment of introspective stillness within the psychological landscape of mid-century urban life, his treatment of solitude, light, and constructed space continues to influence my own approach to thinking about isolation as well as my approach to painting.”

In Morning Sun, Hopper depicts a woman sitting on her bed in the sun, alone in an empty room, wearing a plain orange dress and a simple, contemplative expression. In Morning Sun Dance, Matsu paints a solitary woman with a similarly meditative demeanor. However, her environment is far more richly layered: the room is filled with personal artifacts—dogs, magazines, and a luxurious couch—reflecting contemporary material life. Notably, the presence of dogs, while suggesting companionship, also references historical depictions such as Toutou, le bien aimé by Rosa Bonheur (1885) and A Nurse and a Child in an Elegant Foyer by Jacob Ochtervelt (1663), in which dogs symbolized wealth and ownership. In Matsu’s work, these animals subtly underscore solitude rather than alleviate it—suggesting not connection, but the heightened self-awareness of being alone.

Her clothing fuses Western and Japanese motifs—a William Morris textile layered with traditional patterns—while a Sports Illustrated poster of Muhammad Ali nods to her alignment with diversity, strength, and modern identity. In contrast to Hopper’s figure, who gazes outward toward the cityscape, Matsu’s subject turns inward, facing her domestic space. This shift in gaze implies a broader narrative: solitude, once externalized and meditative, is now negotiated through personal space and cultural consumption.

The exhibition will also feature Matsu’s process drawings, which reveal how the artist engaged with Hopper’s use of light, figuration, and abstraction. Two additional smaller paintings by Matsu also reinterpret Hopper’s iconic figure in the orange dress—one from Hopper’s original perspective, and the other from an external vantage point, as if observing the figure from the outside.

“This exhibition offers a fascinating dialogue between two artists from different eras, both grappling with the complexities of modern life and the experience of solitude,” says Kathleen Motes Bennewitz, Executive Director of the Edward Hopper House Museum. “Matsu’s vibrant and layered response to Hopper’s work invites us to reconsider themes of isolation and introspection through a contemporary lens, highlighting the enduring relevance of Hopper’s vision while embracing new perspectives.”

Jun 042025
 

Currently on view on the High Line in NYC is Teresa Solar-Abboud‘s colorful sculpture, Birth of Islands.

From the High Line’s website about the commission-

Teresa Solar-Abboud creates sculptures, drawings, and videos characterized by an interest in fiction, storytelling, natural history, ecology, and anatomy. In her work, she alludes to material entities in states of transformation and the tension between the organic and synthetic, interior and exterior, gestation and birth, and embryonic and advanced. Solar-Abboud wields these tensions as a tool, not to draw binary juxtapositions, but rather to suggest that they co-exist in a quantum world, in a constant flow state of evolution. This is articulated in her work through an interest in and re-imagination of life’s diverse and sophisticated networks—cultural, geological, industrial, and anatomical—and how these systems overlap or sometimes clash.

For the High Line, Solar-Abboud presents Birth of Islands, a new sculpture in her series of zoomorphic shapes inspired by animals and prehistoric life forms. Birth of Islands, is composed of slick, blade-like foam-coated resin elements that emanate outward from the pores of a muddy, gray ceramic stump. When visiting New York, Solar-Abboud was struck by the landscape—building after building rising from the soil in a fight for prominence, just as vegetation in the forest combats for sunlight in order to survive. Birth of Islands refers to this competitive ecosystem, while also evoking human anatomy: two yellow, tongue-like emanations have seemingly tunneled their way from underground onto the High Line. The forms are spoon-like in their appearance, concave or convex, depending on one’s vantage point. The result appears simultaneously post-human and primordial, sophisticated and elementary—a representation of our own unending transformation alongside nature’s ever-evolving state.

This sculpture will be on view through July 2025.

May 312025
 

Cindy Bernhard‘s Dangle, 2024, was part of PLATO gallery’s 2024 inaugural group exhibition, Double Vision.

In a recent interview with Overstandard, she discusses her practice and specifically the use of cats-

Cats and dogs frequently appear in your paintings as stand-ins for humans, adding layers of humor and empathy. What inspired this choice, and how do these animals enhance the narratives within your work?

Cindy: I was trained in figure painting, and I was making figure paintings for many years. I found that when painting the figure, the dialog about my work became a conversation about identity politics. In my painting practice, that is not of interest to me. My interests lie in the human experience, not gender, or body type, or the color of someone’s skin. I’m interested in shared human connection, shared emotions like grief, pain, beauty, suffering, and joy. There are days I miss painting the figure and I can see it returning in my work again one day.

With that in mind… What do you think it is about cats that resonates so well with you?

Cindy:  I love looking for the cats and dogs in old master paintings: they are always so weird and expressive.  Even though they are in the background and very small, they have a lot to say. In my work the cats become the main character, I think it adds humor, and it’s easier for people to connect to the cat than a figure, which is interesting.  There’s also a song I love, by one of my favorite bands, mewithoutyou.  For some reason this part of the song ‘a glass can only spill what it contains’ always stuck with me…

A cat came drifting
On my porch from the outside cold
And with eyes closed, drinking
Warm milk from my bowl
Thought, “Nobody hears me, nobody hears me
As I crept in so soft
And nobody sees me, nobody sees me”
As I watch six steps off

In my mind I would always see this cat creeping along….not wanting to be caught.  I think it’s about when we do things in the dark and think no one knows, God still sees.

May 162025
 

“Radiating Kindness (Oil)”, 2023, Oil on linen

“Bold Glamour”, 2023, Digital print on linen

For AI Paintings, Matthew Stone‘s 2023 exhibition at The Hole’s Lower East Side location, he explored new ways of using the latest technology while expanding on techniques used in his previous digital creations.

Details from The Hole about this exhibition-

Two LED screens form the center of this show, displaying an unedited stream of novel AI outputs; a new painting every ten seconds. Corresponding in scale to the surrounding works on linen and functioning like smart canvases, these AI paintings transform endlessly and if you’re alone in the gallery, you will be the only person to ever see that version of the artwork.

Stone’s AI paintings—both the tangible on linen and the fleeting screenic pieces—are created through his training of a custom AI model on top of Stable Diffusion’s open source, deep learning, text-to-image model. By feeding it only his past artworks, Stone has created a self-reflexive new series of AI works that disintegrates the hegemony of the singular static masterpiece and problematizes the idea of ownership, or even what “the artwork” itself entails.

AI has become part of contemporary culture, used to solve real world problems and also create TikTok filters. It’s a tool and like a paintbrush it can be used skillfully or not. At the moment AI is throwing the art world into upheaval as artists explore its potential, galleries contend with its disruption of technique and presentation and collectors and museums feel the dissolution of authorship and ownership.

A second type of work makes its debut here, Radiating Kindness (Oil), a 3D printed, machine-assisted oil painting made in collaboration with ARTMATR labs in Red Hook, where MIT artists and engineers have come together to make innovative tools and tech. By leveraging AI, robotics, computer vision and painting scripts, their robot has created a traditional oil painting in three dimensions. You can see on the surface how the interplay between analog and digital mark making is eye-boggling.

The show also includes examples of Stone’s “traditional” technique, which is anything but: on the 13-foot wide linen painting, Irradiance, four nude figures dance over piles of strewn AI paintings. The figures in the foreground, reminiscent in choreography of Henri Matisse’s Dance (La Dance), 1910, are bodacious, athletic women, heavy and sexy like a Michelangelo marble while at the same time futuristic, weightless and splendid in impossible glass and metallic brush marks. Here Stone’s circular and sensitive approach is laid bare for the viewer, the references to art history, technology, culture, access and the pursuit for the intangible is almost overwhelming to grasp.

Stone’s approach points to the deeply interwoven nature of our offline and online lives today. He sees artists’ use of new technologies as necessary, with creatives deploying these tools in a manner that’s not motivated by big tech or financial gains, disrupting the algorithm by creating their own and exploring this new frontier without data-driven deliverables. Creating new context and room for human subjectivities and emotion in the shift from analog to digital that arguably has already occurred.

Below, in an interview for The Standard, he discusses using AI for this work further-

When working with AI, do you sometimes feel overwhelmed or do you always feel in control?

I have never felt fully in control while making art and I’ve always been back and forth between wanting to be and understanding the transformative and creative power of just letting go. The most exciting moments in my creative process have often been unexpected mistakes. Those happy mistakes have revealed something that can then be consciously amplified. Using AI creates lots of unexpected outcomes very fast. So as someone who likes accidents in this context of image making, it’s a good way to become accident-prone.

Do you consider AI as just another digital tool? Or does it feel more like a collaboration? In other words, do you sometimes feel AI might develop its own taste, point of view, conscience?

It’s a digital tool and I try to resist the urge to anthropomorphize it. But it’s difficult because it feels like such a paradigm shift and also sometimes like dreaming. I think that culturally speaking, we are moving in a direction that assigns these qualities of perceived sentience to AI even when more mundane actions are at play. It’s not clear to me how we will tell if AI has achieved general intelligence, but I think most people will assume it to be the case long before it actually happens, assuming that it does.

May 152025
 

The images above are from David Hockney’s 2023 exhibition of iPad paintings, 20 Flowers and Some Bigger Pictures, at Pace Gallery. Hockney discusses these works in this essay from the show’s catalogue.

From Pace about this exhibition-

This exhibition will present a distinct series of editioned and signed inkjet prints including five landscapes, twenty floral still lifes, and a composite of three iPad paintings depicting a bouquet of gladioli. These works reveal the presence of Hockney’s hand as well as his deliberate technique for drafting larger-than-life compositions on the iPad. While Hockney’s flowers capture the fleeting stillness of his subjects, his immersive landscapes establish the vastness of his rural surroundings. Whether bound to a single moment in time or created from multiple planes of vision, Hockney’s distinctive sense of time and space draws from art historical examples ranging from the Bayeux Tapestry and seventeenth-century Chinese scrolls to the still lifes of Henri Matisse.

A cornerstone of the series, Hockney’s landscapes call upon his observations of the changing of seasons. In each of his gridded picture planes, Hockney reimagines the Normandy countryside with bright colors, abstracted forms, and impossible angles of otherwise traditional outdoor scenes. Placing his focus on themes of renewal and rebirth, the resulting body of work reflects the pastoral nostalgia and beauty of the natural world.

First reproduced by the German newspaper, Die Welt, and later debuted at Musée Matisse in Nice, Hockney’s series of twenty flower iPad paintings captures various arrangements of blooms set against a backdrop of gingham tablecloths and burgundy walls. “I was just sitting at the table in our house, and I caught sight of some flowers in a vase on the table,” Hockney explains. “A few days later I started another from the same position with the same ceramic vase. This took longer to do. I then realized if I put the flowers in a glass vase the sun would catch the water, and painting glass would be a more interesting thing to do. So then I was off.” Though attributes vary in each work, such as the species of flower, type of vase, and the color of the tablecloth, consistent elements across this series allow viewers to admire Hockney’s technique and dedication to his subject. Capturing a spectrum of floral compositions with contrasting tones and textures, Hockney displays his propensity for balancing the central artistic elements of line, color, and perspective.

At the center of the exhibition, Hockney debuts his latest large-scale photographic drawing, 25th June 2022, Looking at the Flowers (Framed). Within the composition, Hockney is depicted twice – once on the right side of the scene, and once on the left – sitting in an armchair and looking upon his twenty flower still lifes displayed salon-style on a navy-blue wall. “This is photographic but is in no way an ordinary photograph,” Hockney describes. “I had been doing what I called photographic drawings, giving a much more 3D effect. This is because you have to look at these through time (unlike an ordinary photograph which you see all at once).” From a series of individual photographs, Hockney constructs a seamless panorama that defies the natural parameters of time and space. The photographic drawing pulls viewers into a self-referential world that is at once familiar and entirely new. “Most people thought the photograph was the ultimate depiction of reality, didn’t they? People thought, This is it, this is the end of it. Which it’s not. And I’m very certain it’s not, but not many people think the way I do.”

Recently Hockney was invited to take over the entire building of the Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum in Paris for David Hockney 25.  The exhibition includes- “more than 400 of his works (from 1955 to 2025) including paintings from international, institutional, and private collections, as well as works from the artist’s own studio and Foundation. There are works in a variety of media including oil and acrylic painting, ink, pencil and charcoal drawing, digital art (works on iPhone, iPad, photographic drawings…) and immersive video installations”. The core of the exhibition concentrates on his work from the past 25 years .

That show is on view until 8/31/25.

May 092025
 

The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night by Rosana Paulino was recently commissioned by the High Line in New York and is on view until December 2025.

From the High Line’s website about the artist and the work-

Rosana Paulino’s practice spans drawing, painting, suture, printmaking, collage, sculpture, and installation. Her work foregrounds social, ethnic, and gender issues, taking particular care to explore the lasting legacy of slavery and the history of both racial and gender-based violence in Brazil. The artist weaves personal, scientific, and historical archives throughout her work, using these materials to demonstrate and then deconstruct violent colonial structures, particularly as they relate to Afro-Brazilian women. Taking into account the impact these archives and memories have on collective values and belief systems, Paulino examines the construction of myths—not only as an aesthetic pillar but also as a key influence on cultural consciousness.

The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night is a continuation of the artist’s mangrove series, which depicts tree-women as a mythological archetype and symbol for the Brazilian biome. Paulino notes that mangroves, like the country’s Black and Indigenous people, have been mistreated and exploited. The artist highlights the symbolic meaning inherent in this ecosystem: It is where life begins, as a home for countless species and as a blue carbon reservoir, and where life ends, due to the decomposition of the mangrove itself. In The Creation of the Creatures of Day and Night, Paulino re-imagines this duality between life and death as day and night. From left to right, the color of the sky fades from daylight to a deeper, midnight hue. In lieu of gilded halos traditionally seen in European representations of holy figures, the tree-women’s heads are framed by halos resembling the sun and the moon. Similarly, the animals surrounding the goddesses also reference the transition from day to night. On the left side of the composition, Paulino depicts two diurnal birds native to the mangrove biome: the white egret and, in the tree-woman’s hands, the scarlet ibis. To her right, the other goddess holds an owl and is flanked by two bats, both of which are nocturnal. Together, these elements present a rich, new mythological framework for the mangrove, offering a departure from depictions shaped by colonization and exploitation.

May 092025
 

The images above are from Saya Woolfalk‘s exhibition The Woods Woman Method at Susan Inglett Gallery this past March.

From the gallery about this show-

The Woods Woman Method is the newest manifestation of the artist’s ongoing exploration of hybrid identity, accomplished through an elaborate fiction inspired by her own family background. Combining elements of African American, Japanese, and European cultures with allusions to anthropology, feminist theory, science fiction, Eastern religion, and fashion, Woolfalk depicts the story of a chimeric species she names the Empathics, botanic humanoid beings with a highly evolved ability to understand the experiences of others.

The Woods Women, a secret society of forest dwellers, first emerged within Woolfalk’s Empathic Universe, as she prepared for her solo exhibition at the Newark Museum of Art in 2021.  While an Artist-in-Residence at the Museum from 2019 to 2021, she closely engaged with its renowned Herbarium and Hudson River School collections, leading to her reimagining of the earth and sky as she considered the “speculative fictions” of these idealized American landscapes, and her consideration of indigenous North American creation myths, oral histories of the descendants of enslaved Africans, and their uses of medicinal plants.

The exhibition features drawings, prints, mixed-media collages, sculpture, and video. Among the works on view are Birthing a New Sky: Starship Moon Cycle (2022), an inspired visualization of the artist’s sister, sitting in a lotus position, anticipating the birth of her daughter. Woolfalk writes:

“For a new sky to be born she must split herself into a million pieces. Each cell in her body replicates itself, spinning in twirling orbits. Her atomized insides burst apart, cascading into the void around her. Swirling and churning, one cell makes its way back to her center, where her heart had been. This brave new life expands, forcing its way out as new light, new land – a new sky.”

Other highlights include the landscape collages, Birthing a New Sky: Manuscripts 3 and 4 (2021),and 5 and 6 (2022),  in which Woolfalk posits an alternative American creation myth. While appearing to be simple abstractions, these works are quite complex, composed of hundreds of intricately pieced and layered elements created from handmade Japanese papers that she has painted and stained with watercolor and gouache, Japanese silver foil, and acrylic medium.

The series of large-scale prints, The Four Virtues (2017) depict the physical embodiments of Prudence, Fortitude, Justice, and Temperance, qualities that are vital to the ethos of her world.

The exhibition was held in advance of Woolfalk’s mid-career survey at the Museum of Arts and DesignSaya Woolfalk: Empathic Universe, curated by Alexandra Schwartz. That exhibition includes multimedia installations paintings, sculptures, performance, and works on paper created during the past twenty years and will be on view until 9/7/25.

Apr 242025
 

“I Like How the Left Side Modulates Up”, 1989, acrylic on canvas (from the “Hitchcock” series)

“Apollo, 617”, 1982, acrylic on canvas

Sundaram Tagore Gallery is currently showing the paintings of the late Robert Natkin for the exhibition A Better Place. The colorful abstract works are from the several series he produced during his lifetime.

Natkin used his artwork to explore different concepts and influences, many of which are listed in the press release below and in the information provided alongside several of the artworks.

“The Beloved (Field Mouse)”, 1969, acrylic on linen

Here, for example, is the information provided for the painting above, from his Field Mouse series-

Natkin explored motile, fragmentary shapes from 1967 onward in the “Field Mouse” series, a reference to a poem by Ezra Pound about the passage of time. These visualizations of fleeting life-experience, with which Natkin sought to form a new emotional vocabulary, often resemble microscopic views of teeming organisms. For him, they were complex emotional landscapes, reflecting a romantic turn when the Natkin family moved from New York to the quiet of rural Connecticut in 1970.

And the Days Are Not Full Enough

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass
Ezra Pound

More from the gallery’s press release-

Robert Natkin is internationally recognized as an unsurpassed colorist and for the beauty of his large-scale abstract canvases. He was represented by blue-chip New York gallerists Elinor Poindexter in the 1960s and André Emmerich in the 1970s. Today, his work is in the collections of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.

Born to a poor and unhappy Russian-Jewish family in Chicago during the Great Depression, Natkin would transcend his traumatic upbringing, often finding refuge in the color and splendor of the movies, charting an industrious course through public art education and briefly co-founding a gallery, to become one of the foremost American abstract colorist painters of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. His paintings are life-affirming, sensual celebrations of visual delight, of glorious Hollywood Technicolor, of fascinating surface effects, enticing layers, and sunny outlooks.

Natkin’s painterly journey can be seen through its distinct and loosely phased series as he accumulated years of psychotherapy and read and looked voraciously. They reveal his drive for redemption not just through introspection, but by consistently forging new stylistic syntheses.

FEATURED SERIES

The vigorous, gestural brushwork of Natkin’s early abstractions reflects the seismic impact of the Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, and Jackson Pollock, whose work he encountered in an article about Abstract Expressionism in Life magazine in 1949. Natkin also found inspiration in French artists Matisse and Bonnard, among others in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago where he studied from 1948–1952.

In 1957, Natkin married the painter Judith Dolnick and together they founded the Wells Street Gallery in downtown Chicago, exhibiting cooperatively with a group of young contemporaries who similarly explored free-form abstraction, including the sculptor John Chamberlain, Ann Mattingly, Gerald van de Wiele and friend Ernest Dieringer. Wells Street Gallery made its cultural mark but was commercially unsuccessful, closing two years later, whereupon Natkin and Dolnick moved to New York.

In New York, Natkin’s vigorously abstract paintings took on more rectilinear qualities, decisively so with his Apollo series, characterized by loose vertical bands of color. The series began in the early 1960s under the inspiration of Rilke’s poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, based on a sculptural fragment in the Louvre, with its final imperative: “You have to change your life.” Named after the Greek god of the sun, the arts and healing, the Apollos established for Natkin the purpose of his art as a means of transformation for self and society.

The Apollo series was long-lived, spanning the 1960s and revived in the mid-1970s. The later instances incorporated Natkin’s distinctive technique of applying acrylic paint with a sponge covered in cloths of various textures, which he discovered in 1971. At his Dolnick’s suggestion, Natkin made a painting on a dishcloth because she had seen him make little paintings on handkerchiefs to give to friends, and then came up with the idea of effectively printing from it. The technique increased his productivity and transformed his aesthetic.

The pointillistic, gauzy effect of this technique came into its own in the more muted, diaphanous visions of the Bath series, so named for the English city where Natkin was to have an exhibition. The subtle, atmospheric nature of the Bath paintings are akin to his earlier Intimate Lighting series, which ran through much of the 1970s, and were described by British art critic Peter Fuller as possessing hints of portraiture in their central focus and inspired by Cubism in the clearly applied blocks of sponge-and-cloth-painting.

Natkin’s Straight Edge and Step paintings emerged from a period in the mid-1960s when he was preparing to teach a course on color at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and read Josef Albers’ theories on its interaction. They also channel the modernist architecture of his native Chicago, his love of jazz singers Billie Holiday and Nina Simone, and the dynamic grid-pattern streets of New York.

He explored motile, fragmentary shapes from 1967 onward in the Field Mouse series, a reference to a poem by Ezra Pound about the passage of time. These visualizations of fleeting life-experience, by which Natkin sought to form a new emotional vocabulary, often resembled microscopic views of teeming organisms and organelles. For him, they were also complex emotional landscapes, reflecting a more romantic turn when the Natkin family moved from New York to the quiet of rural Connecticut in 1970.

In 1977, Natkin produced the Bern series, named for the Swiss capital where the Klee Foundation is located and where Natkin spent many hours among Paul Klee’s works. In this series, he uses more sharply delineated shapes against expansive fields of intense color. Perhaps the boldest colors and shapes appear in the 1980s in the Hitchcock series, an homage to the great director and the movie-theater origins of his artistic journey. Hitchcock’s interest in psychoanalytic themes where dark secrets often drive the narrative, and his charging of the carefully crafted scenery and props with menacing symbolism appealed to Natkin.

Robert Natkin died in 2010 after several years of declining health. Over the course of his career, he demonstrated a remarkable capability of spanning beauty and ugliness in his art, though he dedicated his prime to the struggle of the former over the latter, to the Apollonian ascendancy of light over darkness.

In Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a 1982 documentary by award-winning filmmaker Mike Dibb, Natkin says, “In one sense, I want to be superhuman, but in another sense, I feel I’m barely an animal. And it’s a practice that I think if I don’t always maintain, juggle both these kinds of reality, I could then very easily be done in by the very kind of reparation that I use to make myself and that I hope will help the rest of the world to become a better place. I want to become a better place! Not a person: I want to become a better place, because as a person, I’m going to be gone in—I don’t know—ten minutes or ten years, but I want to become a better place.”

This exhibition closes 4/26/25.

 

Apr 232025
 

“Untitled”, 2024, camera obscura Ilfochrome photograph (far left) and “Untitled Head” and “Head 2”, 2024, multi-layered pigment print and hand-applied gesso on canvas

“Black and White Poppies”, 2022, gelatin silver contact print mounted to board and mounted to aluminum (left) and “Untitled”, 2024, multi-layered pigment-print and hand applied gesso on canvas (right)

Richard Learoyd‘s exhibition A Loathing of Clocks and Mirrors, on view at Pace, features his recent dreamlike photographs from 2018-2025.  Many of the works were made using a custom-built camera obscura, while others were created using multiple impression printing layered with gesso on canvas.

More from the gallery-

Deeply inspired by Dutch Golden Age painting, Learoyd’s latest works take viewers on a journey through intimate moments and intricate details, examining the relationship between subject, light, and space. The photographs on display explore a range of subjects, from hauntingly evocative portraits to still-life compositions that breathe life into the simplest of objects.

Learoyd’s unique photographic processes require an immense degree of technical precision, resulting in incredibly detailed, luminous prints with a tactile richness rarely seen in contemporary photography. Reflecting on the delicate interplay between light, shadow, and form, Learoyd’s work is imbued with a surreal, auratic presence that speaks to his enduring interest in the notion of collective photographic memory—the idea that a picture can be felt and understood on a subconscious level. The artist is renowned for his masterful use of light and his ability to capture the profound depth and stillness of the human experience.

“Light and space have always been central to my work,” Learoyd explains. “I want to capture more than just an image; I want to convey a sense of time, intimacy, and presence—things that transcend the immediate and evoke a more timeless feeling.”

Highlights in the exhibition, carefully curated by Learoyd, include a photograph of clasped hands, an ode to Alfred Stieglitz’s images of Georgia O’Keeffe’s hands from the first half of the 20th century. Also on view will be the artist’s most recent body of work, a series of photographs created using a new and transformative process of multiple impression printing layered with hand coated gesso on canvas. These multi-dimensional works showcase the artist’s exploration of depth, texture, time, and the relationship between photography and materiality.

This exhibition closes 4/26/25.

Apr 222025
 

“Matsushima Triptych”, 2025, Monofilament, cotton, linen, kid mohair

“River Triptych”, 2023, Monofilament, cotton, linen, kid mohair

The two triptychs above are from Hiroko Takeda‘s solo exhibition, The Ten Thousand Threads at Hunter Dunbar Projects. These works evoking environmental patterns are presented along with others more focused on geometric forms.

From the gallery about the artist and her work-

Hiroko Takeda (b. 1966, Nagoya, Japan) is a Brooklyn-based artist who expresses her world in thread. She has taken her rigorous training in the Mingei Undo-the Japanese Arts and Crafts Movement-which honors and emphasizes the characteristics, capacities, treatments and beauty of materials-to boundary-crossing distances and depths in nearly 40 years of global practice. Mingei was developed in the mid-1920s in Japan by philosopher and aesthete Yanagi Soetsu (1889-1961), along with a group of craftsmen, including the potters Hamada Shoji (1894-1978) and Kawai Kanjiro (1890-1966).

The Ten Thousand Threads takes its title from the Taoist concept of “the ten thousand things.” Often attributed to the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, it refers to the notion that in spite of the variety visible in the world, all things are fundamentally one. Applying this to Takeda’s practice, the multitudinous variations in weft and weave, color, pattern, and structure in her work can be seen as having an underlying connection; the works reside within the “the rule-bound world of weaving” and simultaneously emphasize an “invitation  to the accidental, disorderly, or unexpected.” Takeda’s works in The Ten Thousand Threads strive to transcend boundaries between light and dark, raw and refined, geometry and fluidity, painting and sculpture. 

The exhibition features works from 2016 to 2025, consisting of varying approaches to structure, pattern, and color. The Blueprint and Still Life series utilize the ‘Giant Waffle’ technique to evoke Minimalist rectilinear patterns. The deeply structured grids created by the warp and weft of Takeda’s weaving push the compositions dramatically into three-dimensional space.

Works using transparent thread, on the other hand, imply subtle and dreamlike landscapes. In her recent Matsushima triptych (2025), for example, Takeda uses staggered horizontal passages of fine and coarse textures to suggest the seascapes and islands of tsunami-weathered northeastern Japan. Whether underscoring geometric form or expressive vistas, Takeda’s work illuminates the fundamental tensions between tradition and innovation as well as complexity and reductionism.

As Takeda points out, “the world I see, like the world of warp and weft, has rules and constraints that are supposed to be good for us, but disorder happens naturally, and the other side of tension is fluidity. I manipulate and orchestrate the elements and welcome accidental moments of material behavior.” Whether underscoring geometric form or expressive vistas, Takeda’s work illuminates the fundamental tensions between tradition and innovation as well as complexity and reductionism.

This exhibition is on view until 4/26/25.