An award-winning NYC blogazine, primarily about painting
Sunday, February 1, 2026
Join us on Sunday, February 8 at 2 pm for a lively conversation with abstract painters Sharon Butler, Wendy Fulenwider Liszt, and Ariel Mitchell as part of our exhibition Street Corner Conversations. Seating is limited, and refreshments will be served.
Contributed by Michael Brennan / Anne Russinof passed away a year ago at the age of 68. “Gestural Symphony” is a commanding memorial retrospective of her mostly large, emphatically gestural paintings. Posthumous exhibitions are by nature bittersweet, but Russinof’s resists melancholy because her work is so irrepressibly lively. Her signature outsize curves are sweeping and springy. They kick, bounce, and jump around.
Dear Two Coats of Paint Readers, This week we launch the 2025 Two Coats of Paint Year-End Fundraising Campaign and, because you are a loyal […]
Remember Hurricane Sandy? It was a devastating superstorm that struck the northeastern United States on October 29, 2012, and turned into one of the most […]
Contributed by Will Kaplan / Beck Lowry’s sculptural paintings act as vessels. But what do they hold? Memory? Sensation? Labor? Five such pieces comprise “First Storm,” at Yossi Milo Gallery, the artist’s first New York solo show. In its earthen palette and irregular construction, the work resembles ceremonial objects, though the associated eras and cultures remain mysterious. For understanding the art’s function and what it contains, Lowry’s process is key.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / On view in the upstairs gallery at Bortolami, Enzo Shalom’s paintings – modest in image and muted in palette – carry a quiet intensity that has felt rare among young New York painters in recent years. At a time when traditional painterly bravado dominates, Shalom takes a different route, making vulnerability seem like a radical act. His work leans into restraint: awkward angles, washed-out tones, and just enough mark-making to read as intentional without seeming overworked. If you can imagine early Luc Tuymans’ bleached-out hues, EJ Hauser’s jagged lines, and Gary Stephan’s off-kilter compositions, you’ll land somewhere near the world of Shalom’s paintings. It’s a subdued, thoughtful space, low-key but deeply engaging.
Contributed by Sharon Butler / It’s February, we’re two weeks into the first hundred days, and your head, like mine, may be spinning. Take your mind off the world for a minute. Be grateful for the good things in your life, maybe figure out how to help where help is needed. A little light could emerge from the February shows. “La Banda” gets back together at Tappeto Volante Projects. Platform Project Space reopens from their winter break with a big group show called “New Life,” curated by Alexi Worth and Danica Lundy. Rumor is that it involves paintings of babies. Maybe it’s time to see a show at Halsey McKay Gallery HMGP in Greenpoint, where Timothy Bergstrom’s work is on view. Then let’s all go buy a canister of pepper spray and sign up for a self-defense class.
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.
January news: Astonishing. Completely astonishing. Thanks to you, Two Coats of Paint raised about 20% more last year than in 2023, setting a record for our year-end fundraising campaigns. Due in large part to the Open House art and merch sale in December, this result affords us the resources to continue operating: to pay the server fees and the writers and to craft an online publication that matters to the NYC art community and beyond. Your donations and purchases, combined with our modest advertising revenue and your generous recurring contributions, will keep the lights on….
It starts again! The annual campaign—a reminder that survival in the arts isn’t just about making work, but sustaining the framework that allows it to exist and thrive. We know art is essential, and it needs financial support. Today, we launch the 2024 Two Coats of Paint Year-End Fundraising Campaign, because the simple truth is that without funding, the platform falters, the conversation dims….
Welcome to the early edition of our October painting-centric gallery guide. Later in the month we will be updating the list with more exhibitions that open in the second half of the month. Galleries that would like their shows considered for inclusion should send a note to…
Contributed by Sharon Butler / After a lengthy stretch during which emerging painters have leaned into commercial preferences for the traditional, many seem to be breaking free from the market’s emphasis on imagery and narrative. Painters with a penchant for experimental, near three-dimensional approaches have bounced back into the conversation they commanded in the early 2010s. Three current exhibitions, all curated by artists, reflect various aspects of this phenomenon.
Contributed by Marcus Civin / The Philadelphia-born, New York-based painter Sedrick Chisom’s gothic, thematically inventive “…And 108 Prayers of Evil” at Clearing is his first solo show in New York. At the entrance to the gallery, a block of wall text sets the scene for Chisom’s mostly large-scale oil paintings and charcoal drawings. The action depicted occurs in the year 2210, when the Greek mythological figure Medusa is in trouble again. Almost comically, various political groups accuse her of listening to whispers in the forest and slipping gangsta rap lyrics to pious youth. A magmatic eruption threatens, and massacres have occurred in a place called Capital Citadel.
What’s up outside the city? At Jack Shainman The School in Kinderhook, take some time at the sprawling installation by Meleko Mokgosi, co-director of Graduate Studies in Painting/Printmaking at Yale. Employing a range of media dense with meaningful images and ideas, the show explores the theme of subjugation. Also in Kinderhook, stop by SEPTEMBER for “Of Waves,” a two-person abstraction exhibition featuring London-based Jane Bustin and Hudson Valley-based Anne Lindberg. The two painters investigate the things we can feel but can’t see or touch. Carrie Haddid has an elegant group landscape show called “Vanishing Point.” Also in a landscape mode but perhaps less somber is Mary Breneman’s bold landscapes at D’Arcy Simpson, which recall Marsden Hartley’s paintings of Maine. On view at Pamela Salisbury are Kozloff’s maps and a group show of work inspired by books as well as Robin Hill’s rustic-industrial sculptures.
At LABspace, Julie and Ellen have put together another fine “Holiday” sampler exhibition featuring hundreds of small works by notable artists from the Hudson Valley, Brooklyn, and beyond. Front Room Gallery and Buster Levi too offer group shows of work that would be perfect for heirloom gift-giving.
In Chatham, at Joyce Goldstein, don’t miss “Horizon Line.” Curated by Susan Jennings and David Humphrey, this will be the last show at the gallery unless someone steps up to take over the lease.
Take a look below, as there is a lot more worth checking out. Note that the Guide now includes selected listings for galleries in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. Welcome to the Two Coats Selected Gallery Guide!
Contributed by David Carrier / Painting with a loaded brush to create heavy layers of pigment by juxtaposing strands of varied colors is a distinctive, philosophically interesting art form. Eugène Leroy (1920–2000), a notable practitioner of it, had real doubt about the validity of the very act of making paintings. So did Alberto Giacometti. They asked when an artwork was finished, and answering the question is a particularly stiff challenge for one who wields a loaded brush. Such an artist tends to feel compelled keep painting until he or she can “get it right,” which may never happen. Repainting, of course, can also simply manifest love of the activity, and the desire that it never end.
