The Body Painted — Figuration and Flesh

Joan Semmel: Continuities presents recent paintings in which Semmel, in her nineties, continues to paint her own body as an authored image — internalized rather than observed. Saturated hues move across flesh in broad passages; figures emerge and dissolve; layering allows multiple versions of the body to coexist on the same surface. Presented simultaneously in New York and Brussels, the exhibition's dual structure mirrors the paintings' own logic of doubling and multiplicity, extending presence across two cities while affirming the transatlantic bonds of feminist thought and cultural exchange.

Apr 17 - May 30

Juanita McNeely: Holding Back spans works from the 1980s through her late career, unified by deep cobalts and ultramarines that animate figures — human and animal, often simultaneously — in radically destabilized pictorial space. Ladders, windowpanes, netting, mirrors, and shadows fracture compositions into multiple planes that multiply and collapse at once. The earliest work, Pre-Abortion Law Remembrance (1985), connects to her pathbreaking Whitney-held nine-panel painting, reckoning with the violence of her near-fatal fight for a life-saving procedure. Across all, McNeely transforms the ugly and terrible into something radiant.

Apr 10 - May 16

Sheida Soleimani: Forest of Stars extends Soleimani's Ghostwriter series, which reconstructs her parents' experiences of political exile following the 1979 Iranian Revolution through studio tableaux combining archival photographs, symbolic objects, and living subjects. New Flyways photographs bring migratory birds into focus — drawn from her work as a wildlife rehabilitator — connecting displacement, survival, and care across species. A site-specific wall drawing by her mother extends this familial lineage into the gallery, proposing that tending to vulnerable bodies is itself a political act.

Apr 16 - May 22

Primordial Soup is an exhibition of new paintings by Anastasiya Tarasenko stemming from the trauma of a near-death ectopic pregnancy. The ocean serves as a central metaphor, evoking hormonal flux, emotional instability, and the capacity to both generate and destroy. A small female figure repeats across vast seascapes—riding waves, plunging, suspended between ascent and descent. Humor and brutality coexist throughout, as human and animal figures move through acts ranging from tender to grotesque.

Apr 16 - May 23

Birgit Jürgenssen: Drawings and Photographs brings together twenty-four works spanning more than two decades of the Austrian feminist artist's practice — from Surrealist-inflected drawings of the late 1960s through groundbreaking photo linen and mixed-media experiments of the early 1990s. Working in deliberate privacy amid the violent masculinity of the Viennese Actionists, Jürgenssen developed a language of Surrealist irony and autobiographical depth to subvert gender hierarchies and the fetishization of the female body. Her Stoffarbeiten (fabric works) layer photographic images with linen and mesh, dissolving the body into shifting optical fields.

Apr 14 - May 16