Solo Shows

Solo Shows

Theresa Daddezio: A pinball wizard’s aesthetic order

Contributed by Jason Andrew / In her new paintings in “Bloom” at DC Moore Gallery, Theresa Daddezio suggests an ornate elegance structured by a quirky sense of pinball-wizardry. Playful and lighthearted, each of the sixteen paintings in this packed show offers a vibrant world of color and fluid forms, simulating the visual experience of a flashy arcade. The paintings are spatially dense and lyrically conceived. Their all-over purity might tie her work to aesthetic movements like Neo-Plasticism. Indeed, her work, in Mondrian’s terms, expresses the “aesthetically purified” and ignores “the particulars of appearance.” Yet it also embodies a fantasized complexity that affords the paintings a dynamic arc. Daddezio has certainly found her cipher – an algorithm defined by petal-like structures, collaged color gradations, and zig-zagging linear forms.

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Solo Shows

Jen Mazza’s narrative interplay

Contributed by Michael Brennan / “Vicissitudes of Nature” is the magisterial title of Jen Mazza’s first solo exhibition with Ulterior Gallery, and, given the calamitous start of 2025, her Cassandra-like premonitions could hardly be any timelier. Nearly two dozen paintings and works on paper occupy the top floor of the tin-tiled, pitched-ceilinged space. Deftly and seamlessly, Mazza uses a variety of techniques and strategies, appropriating images from multiple sources. The idea is to conflate them with important cultural signifiers while recontextualizing them into new narratives of interiority, as, say, Virginia Woolf did in her contemplation of “the waves” in her eponymous novel, quoted in the show.

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Solo Shows

Deirdre Frost: Windows on the world

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Deirdre Frost’s multifaceted paintings, on display in her solo show “Tumbling Earth” at Kevin Kavanagh Gallery in Dublin, exude an edgy, futuristic energy you’d glean from a David Lynch movie, in which teal curtains and magenta skies feel oddly familiar yet distinctly foreign. Frost, who is based in Cork, challenges us to reconsider what home might look like when the distinction between indoor and outdoor no longer held. Her world could be the one that emerged after some kind of apocalypse, in the wake of civilization, viewed furtively, perhaps from caves. 

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Solo Shows

Cyrilla Mozenter: The quieting of industrial material

Contributed by Michael Brennan / To my mind, the cultivation of art is mainly about making distinctions, and Cyrilla Mozenter’s solo show “Problems of Art” at 57W57 Arts hits that mark. She is essentially a sculptor – and a great one – in that she makes beautiful objects. Much as I admire her approach to volume, though, it’s her novel transformation of drawing into predominantly felt sculpture – decisive cuts made with sewing shears, silk whipstitching like super-sutures – that generates the greatest sense of adventure.

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Solo Shows

Chris Martin: Staring into the sun

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Chris Martin is deep into a nearly five-decade-long artistic odyssey fueled by an unrelenting passion for process, spontaneity, and embracing the unexpected. His prolific energy, both physical and creative, melds into his broad knowledge of painting history and an insatiable desire to share his thoughts, feelings, and vast collection of everyday ephemera and small objects by embedding them in paint on canvas. Martin’s paintings are bursts of assemblage showcasing the power of proximity – vibrant cacophonies of glitter, pages ripped from textbooks books, magazine remnants, letters, and newspaper clippings. “Speed of Light,” his second solo exhibition with Timothy Taylor, draws inspiration from the dark night sky in the Catskills, inflecting profound questions about the universe with a comedian’s flair for the seriously absurd. The results are thought-provoking, funny, and, at times, ecstatic. 

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Solo Shows

Theresa Hackett: Fractured, folded, flattened landscapes

Contributed by Jason Andrew / In her solo show “The Scenic Route” at High Noon, Theresa Hackett remains committed to a process of reimagining nature through abstraction, texture, and bold compositions. Inspired by the dynamic interplay of form and environment, the show echoes the pastoral and sublime themes of classical landscape art – where balance and harmony were paramount – while pushing boundaries with modern kick. Like the early modernist Oscar Bluemner, Hackett’s paintings are – and long have been – architectural distillations of landscapes, structured yet only symbolically realistic. 

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Solo Shows

Kate Shepherd: Feel me

Contributed by Sharon Butler / Kate Shepherd’s 2025 exhibition “ABC and sometimes Y,” at Galerie Lelong & Co. in New York, hums in the space between precision and poetry. The paintings are specific and unshowy, rendered in colors that Shepherd selects for their emotional undercurrents. She teases out big questions: How do we interact with the world? How can we untangle what we see? And how do color and form quietly alter our perceptions? The result is a kind of geometric sorcery whereby shapes don’t sit still – they shimmer, shift, and keep you guessing. Every line, every wobble feels heartbreakingly human, which is extraordinary for geometric abstraction.

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Solo Shows

David Humphrey: The revel is in the details

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / The phenomenon of the selfie, an artifact of the smart phone, is a supreme irony. The act itself suggests a narcissistic preoccupation with recording one’s presence, but its frequency and ubiquity indicates that it doesn’t matter much what person or place gets that honor. Warhol’s fleeting fifteen minutes is compressed into a pandering fraction of a second. I was here; please care. The only auto-photographers who really seem to get durably noticed are the Darwin Award winners whose acrobatic exertions towards drama topple them into the lethal maw of treacherous vistas. Lost in the scree of evanescent look-at-me images is the self in full social and political context, and it’s not in plain sight. There are few painters better suited for excavating it than David Humphrey, as he demonstrates in “porTraits,” his formidable solo exhibition now up at Fredericks & Freiser. Humphrey’s crowning gift – born of comprehensive technical and aesthetic command, a uniquely graphic allusive approach, sardonic wit, and an irrepressible narrative impulse – is to coordinate the nuances of disparate visual elements so finely as to render the busiest of paintings piercingly, disturbingly coherent.

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Solo Shows

Emily Noelle Lambert: Trapping butterflies, chasing wild birds 

Contributed by Jason Andrew / In ‘Wild Birds,” Emily Noelle Lambert’s second solo exhibition at Freight+Volume, she provides an unbridled experience of color and tactility. The show includes five paintings that fence in an array of stacked ceramic works on improvised pedestals. Known for her vibrant, abstract work, Lambert is bold and direct in her exploration of organic forms and dreamlike compositions.

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Solo Shows

Emily Berger: See Emily paint

Contributed by Peter Schroth / In “Spirit Level,” Emily Berger’s solo show at Starr Suites, she continues to expose the depths of a kind of abstract painting that she has intriguingly investigated and perfected over the past decade.  Her minimal compositions are poised confidently between the formal and the lyrical. There is an almost primitive simplicity to what she reveals and purposefully little made of light, movement, and space in the ways we would typically anticipate.

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Solo Shows

Francesco Clemente’s visual facility

Contributed by David Carrier / I have been writing a book about art in the churches of Naples’ historic center. There I also visited the new Kunsthalle Madre, which contains an elaborate two-story permanent installation by Francesco Clemente called “Ave Ovo.” Like baroque Catholic art, Clemente’s work features elaborate symbolism. While the old masters employed it to present church dogma, his symbolism is personal and more elusive. In Naples, however, both exhibit a penchant for sensory overload: more is more. In his splendid show “Summer Love in the Fall,” now at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Clemente still uses some of the same symbols – male and female body parts, his own portrait – but the colors in its 23 paintings are more subdued. The title may well refer to the psychic place of erotic images in his later life as well as the timing of this exhibition, for now his work seems more serene. 

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Solo Shows

Jim Osman: Multiplicities of balance

Contributed by Rachel Youens / The sculptures in Jim Osman’s show “Walnut 3,” now at McKenzie Fine Art, are both architectonic and playful. His constructions, placed on pedestals, are formalist balancing acts made of found lumber, some elements lightly reworked, that are stacked and arranged. Osman’s overall intention is to find a complex situation for entry, where forms assembled from Euclidean solids generate stability or dynamism through exquisitely contrasting proportions and scale. The experience of seeing unfolds in the extended time required to walk around each small free-standing work.

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Solo Shows

Vincent Szarek’s odysseys

Contributed by Ben Godward / Vincent Szarek’s current solo exhibition at R & R, a joint venture between Chart and Marvin Gardens at the juncture of Ridgewood and Bushwick, is his first in New York since moving back to the city from LA. The show is exquisite in itself and enhanced by an ideal location. His works are predominately black with hints of color that flash against the grey and brown industrial trappings of the space. Whereas the preserved vine-covered brick wall behind the largest painting echoes Old Europe, the pitted, patched, cracked, and grooved concrete hosting the central sculpture is pure Brooklyn/Queens. The swells of Szarek’s glossy surfaces flatter both settings, and vice-versa. 

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Solo Shows

Jadé Fadojutimi’s glorious self-restraint

Contributed by Millree Hughes / Painters in their twenties and thirties, particularly those whose work is figuration bordering on abstraction and somewhat gestural, may be trying to do too much. Too often it features too many colors, too many forms, too much of everything. It’s hard not to sympathize. Such artists have grown up in a time when communication occurs in morphing, moving pictures at high speed, and when consumer culture assaults mass consciousness. For some, the most honest response is to be overwhelmed and paint accordingly. Jadé Fadojutimi, whose enigmatically titled solo show “Dwelve: A Goosebump in Memory” is at Gagosian, sees another way. 

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Solo Shows

Dannielle Tegeder’s freighted abstraction

Contributed by Riad Miah / Informed by early modernists such as Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, and Stuart Davis, Dannielle Tegeder’s abstract paintings are in themselves traditional, painted with acrylic on stretched canvas. When displayed, however, their import extends beyond the canvas edges into wall paintings, immersive installations, and even musical collaborations, encouraging a searching and interactive viewing experience. Her solo show “Signals,” currently on view at Standard Space in Sharon, Connecticut, incorporates new elements into her visual vocabulary, including ladder mobiles, stained linen, and walnut panels, freshly drawing on other aspects of art history.

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