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Gallery

Sep 02 - Sep 27 2025 - 19 days left

The Painting Center is pleased to present Speed Bump, an exhibition of new works by Sue Havens in the Main Gallery. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, September 2, and runs through Saturday, September 27, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 4, from 5 to 8 pm. This exhibition features paintings on paper, wooden sculptural paintings, and paintings on panel. Sue Havens is an artist based in New York and Tampa. Since moving to Florida to accept an R-1 position at The University of South Florida, Havens has expanded a large body of work that reflects an embodiment of her surroundings, demonstrating a complex dialogue between painting and sculpture, two and three-dimensionality, and installation. Excerpt from Geoffrey Young’s essay: “With a tile-fitter’s care in placing shapes, Sue Havens’ rage for order is balanced by her love of storm and accident. Her works on paper are filled to the brim with randomly generated distributions of rain-like dust and the debris of cosmic instability. Her concern is to activate the surface of each work, putting each set of decisions in contact with a world where unforeseen things happen. Smudges, stains, and spills find happy homes where the maker’s hand meets rigorous contingencies of all kinds. A Havens is a place where structure and collision are part of the way things are.” Havens earned her BFA in Art from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art from 1990 to 1995, and her MFA in painting from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2003. She is currently an Associate Professor of Art at The University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, where she has been teaching for ten years. Havens has exhibited internationally and nationally in venues such as The Tampa Museum of Art, The Sarasota Art Museum (FL), The Marjorie Barrick Museum (NV), The Museum of Drawings (Sweden), Mindy Solomon (Miami), among many others. Havens was a 2008 Fellowship recipient in Painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her work was featured in Warhol’s Interview Magazine. For more information on the artist, visit: @shavens88 and www.suehavenstudio.com. Full Essay by Geoffrey Young: With a tile-fitter’s care in placing shapes, Sue Havens’ rage for order is balanced by her love of storm and accident. Her works on paper are filled to the brim with randomly generated distributions of rain-like dust and the debris of cosmic instability. Her concern is to activate the surface of each work, putting each set of decisions in contact with a world where unforeseen things happen. Smudges, stains, and spills find happy homes where the maker’s hand meets rigorous contingencies of all kinds. A Havens is a place where structure and collision are part of the way things are. Consider the clarity of her diamond and circular shapes as suggestive of real things without being representational. Her X’s compete with O’s, her vertical lines are propped up or countered by horizontal ones. Havens’ rectangles lock in as they cluster and group. In a nod to process, these works, by design, seem to have survived creative chaos. The playful repetition of specific shapes masquerades as building blocks. The range of her grays alone is masterful, reminding the viewer to study the confidence of her color choices, including the judicious but restrained use of the primaries. I read her geometric realities as more symbolic of labor than of actual factory life. Still, nothing is too pure in a Havens not to undergo some agitation, some drama in the effort to invest it with risk. If these works rime with a world where work is central, where action stimulates production, it is because art triumphs over uncertainty. And happily, these complex works are never too busy to woo viewers with sophisticated aesthetic registrations. - Geoffrey Young

Sep 02 - Sep 27 2025 - 19 days left

The Painting Center is pleased to announce In Every Sense of the Bird, an exhibition of paintings by Louisa Waber in the Project Room. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, September 2, and runs through Saturday, September 27, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 4, from 5 to 8 pm. Louisa Waber draws inspiration in part from her sixth-floor view of the Hudson River and the immense sky above it; the variety of lines and their relationship to space; the zigzagging lines, the curlicues, the broken lines, soaring parallels, sharp dashes and slashes, commas, semicolons, and parentheses. And then there is the light - “Oh, the light,” she says, “a different spectacle and poetry every day and night.” Recently, the view has been altered by the addition of scaffolding in front of the building, offering glimpses of the river, clouds, and sky through a lattice of triangular frames. The scaffolding, though fervently unwelcome at first, brings its geometric beauty. A new kind of structure through which the natural world continues to inspire. Waber is a founding member of The Painting Center and has had two previous solo shows there. Other solo shows include The World Inside This One, in 2025, at TenBerke Architects in NY, New Work, 2017, at The Seligmann Center in Sugar Loaf, New York, and A Way With Words, 2014, at the Goatshed Gallery in Brooklyn. She studied at Cornell University and the NY Studio School. For more information on the artist, visit: @louisawaber and www.louisawaber.com.

Sep 02 - Sep 27 2025 - 19 days left

The Painting Center is pleased to present The Strange Bird Whose Nest I Am In, an exhibition of seven new paintings by Matthew Sepielli in the Main Gallery. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, September 2, and runs through Saturday, September 27, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 4, from 5 to 8 pm. Conceived as a unified set, the works in this exhibit incorporate a diverse range of materials, including handmade casein, photo prints on aluminum, fabric dye, foam core, copper sheets, staples, screws, and various other forms of paint. Making use of these materials, Sepielli creates highly developed, tactile surfaces that cannot be easily understood in reproduction to encourage an in-person viewing experience. Created between 2024 and 2025, the seven paintings in this exhibit are rooted in diverse themes and art historical influences. Borrowing from folklore and historical disasters, personal and family history, Abstract Expressionism, Dada, and Hugo Ball (whose journal entries give this exhibit its title), Sepielli processes these themes and influences through material to create his paintings. The paintings in this exhibit are intended to be a visual concept album, comprising seven distinct tracks with varying times, speeds, and spaces, yet cohesive and unified. An essay by the artist Keith Crowley will accompany this exhibition, along with a small publication. Matthew Sepielli received his B.F.A. from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, and his M.F.A. from Bard College. He lives and works in Southeastern Pennsylvania. For more information on the artist visit: @matthewsepiellipainter and www.matthewsepielli.com