Upcoming Exhibitions

Brian Alfred
Beauty is a Rare Thing
511 West 22nd Street

Beauty is a Rare Thing, Brian Alfred’s sixth solo exhibition with Miles McEnery Gallery, brings together two distinct bodies of work by the artist. For the first series, Alfred documented his recent travels from Osaka to Brooklyn, and the Dominican Republic to the West Village. Snapshots of personal moments shape an exhibition of serene vignettes. 

The accompanying suite of paintings, installed in an adjacent gallery space, is comprised of nine portraits of contemporary musicians. Spanning genres from electronic to folk, the paintings celebrate the power of music in shaping the world around us, as well as the artist himself. 

Alfred’s process, honed over the past two decades, distills his source imagery to its most essential forms, layering idyllic elements together and segmenting forms into two dimensional planes of mostly-solid color to reveal a sense of stillness that can be tranquil, unsettling, or both. His compositions are reminiscent of architectural ukiyo-e prints, both in technique and style, while his exploration of collage continues to inform the resulting paintings. 

“Alfred captures the ephemeral, silencing the noise of the world and focusing solely on the composition,” writes Annabel Keenan. “In every image, there is a sense that he is not only preserving the memory of a place, but also the essence of a specific time. This show… is more personal than his others.” Beauty is a Rare Thing casts a newfound appreciation on the everyday, presenting an aura of hope over our ever changing world. 

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Trudy Benson
XSTATIC
515 West 22nd Street

XSTATIC, Trudy Benson’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, presents the artist’s latest body of paintings. The exhibition’s title reflects the energetic nature of the paintings, along with the visual aspect of the letter X, seen in the intersecting lines that cover the canvases. A continuation of her practice, XSTATIC further explores the influence of pioneering computer art on contemporary abstraction. 

In a departure from her first exhibition with the gallery in October 2021, Benson’s compositions have turned to emphasize fine line work made with an airbrush. From afar, warped planes buzz with motion; when the viewer steps closer, densely-scribbled marks are revealed as the source rather than solid blocks of color. The paintings are rendered in color combinations from monochromatic palettes to power clashing hues, creating harmony in the unexpected. 

“Here is a downright paradox, a whimsical aporia: albeit abstract and self-reflexive, the luxuriously colored and highly intricate paintings of Trudy Benson are imbued with rich art-historical and present-day references,” writes Raphy Sarkissian in the exhibition’s catalogue, “Within Benson’s methodically constructed pictorial fields, where geometric structures and painterly gestures cohabit, autonomy and allusion register as being cut from the same cloth, as inextricable sides of the same coin. To confront the compositionally innovative and chromatically lavish paintings of the recently realized series titled XSTATIC is to come face to face with a self-contained formalist language that is nonetheless inseparable from the boundless archive of modernist abstraction and the visual grammars of its canonical masters.” 

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Ryan McGinness
WYSIWYG
520 West 21st Street

WYSIWYG presents an overarching view of Ryan McGinness’ artistic oeuvre. Bringing together historical works with his most recent paintings, the exhibition showcases his continually evolving perpetual practice. 

For more than two decades, McGinness has established a personal lexicon of icons that he continually references in his work. His iconography, both imagined and drawn from a slew of reference material, include everything from spiraling mandelas and skateboarders to mirrored hands and chandeliers hanging from the top of the canvas. Rendered in fluorescents and core colors alike, McGinness screenprints his symbols to create deeply-layered enigmatic compositions. Catch a glimpse of his painted cryptograms and you find yourself drawn in, look closer and delight in decoding the iconography, which unfolds like a non-linear story, crescendoing in every direction. 

“WYSIWYG is a time-capsule as much as a dictionary, but also a marker of a new chapter for Ryan McGinness,” writes Julie Baumgardner, “When anyone, especially an artist, is secure in their fundamentals, space is made for evolution. Mark our words: dive deep in these works now to decode what’s soon to come.” 

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Michael Reafsnyder
525 West 22nd Street

Reafsnyder’s exuberant and celebratory paintings relish in delight, glee, and exhilaration. They refuse the notion that gestural painting emerges from the anguish of life; they reject both easy existentialism and sentimental pathos. The sheer pleasure of viewing Reafsnyder’s nuanced surfaces is stimulated by their abundance of vividly saturated colors, their profusion of painterly gestures, and their array of enigmatic compositions. Rather than romanticizing a past set of values, or anticipating future ones, the paintings render palpable a present moment in our experience of visual imagery. In his art, the actual contingencies of viewing and the pictorial conditions for communication meet in a cacophony of all-or-nothing enthusiasm. 

Julian Hoeber writes, “Paint is a material. It is organized in a painting by play and discovery. That organizing will inevitably produce arrangements of paint that generate meaning, be they ghostly faces or histories or sense tingling fields of color. The sensations have affect and are not neutral. The histories aren’t either, but Reafsnyder won’t let them be albatrosses. He comes to them with other things— his proclivities and tastes, his peculiar banks of knowledge, the limits of his particular physical self— that let those histories go off on tangents, turn into jokes or open up on more possibilities for play.” 

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