ArtMuse

Where mark making is both the subject and the object of a pictorial practice. In the Swiss artist new show “pontes and arbores” at .mcenery.gallery her paintings utilize photographic, printing and painting techniques to an energetic and playful effect.
“In her ongoing practice, Pia Fries creates expansive abstract works that blend oil painting techniques with screen-printing. Her newest compositions utilize an intricate mixed-media approach, integrating images of wood and accumulated paint from her palette screen-printed directly onto wood panels. The works are inherently self-referential in their materiality and content.

The usage of photography and screen printing embedded in the work is an essential component of the paintings. Pia Fries has, in many respects, developed a unique visual alphabet, the meaning of which is only revealed through the interplay of the individual elements.

Pia Fries’ material research seeks an “aspiration that clearly exceeds mere reproduction,” offering a contrast to our oversaturated world of digital images. This methodical approach to artmaking is not simply about depicting an image, but about engaging with the physical substance of the mediums themselves.”

With incredible detail and admirable perseverance for truth in portraying the brilliance and diversity of churches and cathedrals of Europe the artist has been able to develop a long running series of facades in all the glory of their architecture, artistry and craftsmanship. The current exhibition, aptly titled Facades IV, also comes after more than twenty years of joint work on the FACADES series by Markus Brunetti and his partner and collaborator,Betty Schöner.
“The new works further his mission to document Europe’s religious architecture, and FACADES IV emphasizes his visions of prominent churches, monasteries, and cathedrals in Italy, France and Spain. These buildings are representative of Europe’s foremost religious architecture, and Brunetti has finally realized them in the FACADES series after having spent more than two decades constantly refining his self-devised photographic technique.

Together, Brunetti and Schöner travel Europe in a converted firetruck-turned-photo lab. The two live and work on the road, returning to their subjects over years to take thousands of photographs of each structure, going meter-by-meter. Brunetti then edits, layers, and arranges each shot into composite images that provide an otherwise impossible, perfected view of the building’s façade. With each new entry to the series, the demand for precision and consistency increases, and with it, the difficulty. The result exceeds the possibilities of any single photograph, even at the highest possible resolution, creating works that stand as monuments in and of themselves.”

A rare opportunity to view “The Great Unseen Collection: A Selection of Works from Joel and Carole Bernstein” at Its a dynamic grouping of works on offer from the private collection, on view at the gallery’s location at 525 West 19th Street in New York.
“The selection reflects the refined eye and distinctive taste that the couple honed over more than six decades of collecting, and includes works by Romare Bearden, Joan Brown, Roger Brown, Joe Coleman, Jean Dubuffet, Eric Fischl, Audrey Flack, David Gilhooly, Alex Katz, Alice Neel, Fairfield Porter, Peter Saul,
Bob Thompson, Andy Warhol, John Wesley, Tom Wesselmann, and Joseph Yoakum; along with a
selection of additional works.
Highlights from the presentation include a double portrait by Alice Neel of artist Red Grooms and his wife and collaborator Mimi Gross from 1967; Fairfield Porter’s significant 1966 work, one of
his largest paintings, which debuted in his 1967 show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, New York; Alex Katz’s monumentally scaled portrait of his wife Ada, a 1975 self-portrait by San Francisco painter Joan Brown that featured on the cover of the catalogue for her 2022–2023
retrospective organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; a late Romare Bearden collage, and Andy Warhol’s silk-screened pastiche Judy Garland (1979); among
other important works.” It’s a wonderful opportunity to see some of the best works by the various artists in the collection.

The act of seeing paintings is a visceral experience as his works cross the imaginary separation between a pictorial world and the physical one of the viewer to enter our space. They are grand, emotive and charged with palpable energy. “Anselm Kiefer: Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still” is a new show by the artist at which features a new group of paintings that advance Kiefer’s ongoing exploration of feminine archetypes and landscape as symbolic form.
“For the works on view, Kiefer drew inspiration from poet Rainer Maria Rilke, painter Caspar David Friedrich, and female figures from classical mythology who connect landscapes with allegorical narratives. Incorporating thickly textured layers that emphasize materiality and transformation to embody the luminosity, growth, and movement found in nature, the paintings are executed in oil, acrylic, emulsion, shellac, collaged canvas, gold leaf, and sediment of electrolysis. That last material is a deep verdigris green produced when a bath of copper, salts, and fluids is exposed to electrical current—a process that is a physical realization of the artist’s long-standing interest in alchemy.
The largest group of paintings on view features representations of female figures and faces immersed in dense landscapes, including nymphs from classical mythology (Claea, Electra, and Neaera) who serve as allegorical personifications linked to natural sites. Other paintings draw upon mythic narratives of metamorphosis, including the transformations of Dryope into a lotus tree, Clytie into a heliotrope flower, and Leucothoe into a frankincense tree. Tyche (2024) pictures the goddess of fortune and civic prosperity as seen from behind, wrapped in billowing fabric and suspended over a ringed formation of megalithic stones.

The paintings in Seal My Ears Shut and I Shall Hear You Still extend themes found in two major exhibitions, Anselm Kiefer: Becoming the Sea at the Saint Louis Art Museum (2025–26) and Anselm Kiefer: Le Alchimiste, on view through September 27, 2026, at Palazzo Reale, Milan.”

Real or imaginary, the forest scenes and woodland that depicts in her large scale paintings are at once riveting and unsettling. Are they momentary dream-like places that are projected as if in a dream, only to disappear or perhaps scenes from a fairy tale?
“Rues and Leaves Themselves Alone”, is an exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist at
It’s a painting show but also features a digital wander through the dioramas that inspire Webster’s landscapes.
“You are on the edge of a forest where night is always falling. You are on a journey. As you walk around Emma Webster’s paintings, you explore a world. As you walk through the accompanying video game, you discover that same world again, passing through parts of the same landscapes, overlapping. These are two different renderings of the world, and neither is a perfect representation. One is brightly colorful, it’s daytime, there’s fluff and pollen floating in the air, it is the kind of comforting place one might travel to in a meditation. The other is bleaker, colder, darker, a wide-open space that is foreboding.

These are dreams of animals in dreams of landscapes. They are symbols of animals, or mythical animals that only exist in our minds.…
You are on a journey through a place that is not real. It is a mirage-space, or, a mythical space of pagan animal gods, or, the land of the dead, or someplace else. Like the places of visions, it cannot be represented perfectly, only proposed. These are only attempts to render a space beyond our own…
Different kinds of space and modes of representing space are combined, collaged and smeared together, then rendered as images that break the conventions of landscape painting and illusionistic space. They are spaces that cannot really be understood. They are more like propositions, like the hypothetical spaces of complex algebra. Like when a mathematician is trying to solve a problem and sees the problem manifested as colors and forms before him...” (Dean Kissick)

“The Turning Season”, is a first exhibition in New York of work by the renown Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray (ca 1914-1996) at “Kngwarray was born in Alhalker, located in the Sandover region of the Northern Territory, Australia. An Elder of the Anmatyerr people and custodian of Alhalker, she produced vivid, deeply personal works that express the ancestral and ecological relationships that shape her land. Kngwarray’s practice was rooted in the Dreaming: a dynamic, lived worldview in which ancestral creation stories and laws animate the land, its people, and their connections with the past, present, and future. Her paintings do more than depict these forces—they embody them, giving visual form to the rhythms and energies of her Country. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the term Country extends beyond the land to encompass waters, skies, and all living beings, as well as the cultural, spiritual, and familial responsibilities that connect them.
One of Australia’s most celebrated artists, Kngwarray first worked in batik, an Indonesian textile dyeing technique introduced to a group of Alyawarr and Anmatyerr women from the Utopia region in the Northern Territory in 1977. Kngwarray was an original member of the Utopia Women’s Batik Group, and she made unique experimentations and developed her own personal style in the medium.
Across all her compositions, intricate layers of forms speak to a lifetime of kinship with the seasons and life cycles of plants and animals of her Country. The colors she used are deeply connected to the times in which they were produced—subdued tones during dry periods and bright, vivid hues after rain. Kngwarray’s paintings are not only reflections of her relationship to the living world, but also expressions of cultural and ecological responsibility that transcend time and place.“

We are immediately drawn to the saturated, emotive colors that radiate across all works both monumental and miniature and so we are pulled in to enter the imaginary world created by the influential contemporary painter in her new expansive exhibition at
“Yuskavage has developed a highly
original approach to figuration that continues to expand the possibilities of painting and its role within contemporary art. Her simultaneously assertive and vulnerable, exhibitionist and introspective characters assume dual roles of subject and object, complicating the position of viewership. Deploying color as a character, Yuskavage’s paintings are realms of artifice and imagination in which realistic and abstract elements coexist.
The exhibition marks a significant development in Yuskavage’s practice while synthesizing the themes that have shaped her oeuvre since the beginning. Although many of the paintings and drawings appear to unfold within a studio setting, they are more accurately located in the mind of the artist, becoming imaginative gatherings where time warps and folds back on itself, collapsing spatial and temporal boundaries….Nothing is exactly what it seems; instead, the paintings sustain a
state of constant vacillation. This is something painting as a medium can do, but it is specifically what Yuskavage’s paintings do.”

Good morning from the kids running in the waves, the flowers in the vase, the landscapes, the fruit and other favorite subjects of Impressionist and post-impressionist artists like Cezanne and Van Gogh but reimagined and recomposed of brushstrokes by the always imaginative artist for his new solo show simply titled “Brushstrokes” at
“Vik Muniz is globally renowned for his series recreating popular and art historical imagery using unorthodox source materials—chocolate, sugar, scraps of paper, and junk, among a range of unexpected media. His practice engages the act of looking as a site of physical and symbolic experience, where the presumed nature of an artwork can be thrillingly destabilized. In Brushstrokes, Muniz presents a vibrant homage to the pictorial language of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. The works in this series are created from distinct strokes of paint that are photographed, cut out, and arranged into compositions after artists such as Paul Cézanne, Joaquín Sorolla, Vincent van Gogh, and Edouard Vuillard. These artists proposed new ways of seeing the world, realized through sensorial expressions of color, medium, and light. Drawing on this history, Muniz embraces the ambiguities of material (re)creation as a source of visual experimentation and discovery.”

Forms flow, undulate and swirl or they are quietly constructed in geometric grid formation, but all the new paintings in a first solo show at of LA based artist are composed of vibrant colors and carefully applied tiny dots that echo her meditation practice.
“For Jain, painting is more than a means of creative expression. After experiencing several family tragedies by the time she was a teenager, including the death of her brother, it became a salve and a refuge, helping her to cope with feelings of grief and loneliness.
In 2015, Jain turned her attention to Minimalism, in particular, the work of Agnes Martin. Coinciding with the deepening of her spiritual practice, Jain’s work evolved, becoming more refined and distilled. The desire to convey the intangible process of breath awareness, an integral element of her meditation, inspired Jain to develop a distinctive visual language articulated in dots, dashes, and lines. She deploys these elements amid translucent washes of pigment in her two current series of colorful abstract paintings, Yantra and Ta**ra.
The Yantra series (begun in 2020) is named for the geometric configurations often used as a visual aid for meditation. Characterized by precisely arranged grid motifs that emanate from a central point, these mesmerizing works align with the concept of samadhi, the mind’s ability to achieve a state of undisturbed focus and peace through meditation.
Where the Yantra series is orderly and focused, Jain’s  Ta**ra series (begun in 2021) is fluid and organic, characterized by swirling concentrations of marks that coalesce into boundless, flowing arrangements. In these works, Jain lets go of structure and surrenders to freedom and spontaneity. The compositions are lively and unrestrained, evoking topographical maps, shimmering constellations, or colonies of microorganisms.
When presented together, the Yantra and the Ta**ra paintings, which share the same visual and spiritual language, suggest there is an equilibrium that can exist between the opposing forces that reside within us.“