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Gallery

Jul 09 - Sep 19 2026 - 26 days left

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts (KMFA), the New York City-based contemporary art gallery founded by Kathryn Markel, celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2026. Since opening in 1976, the gallery has built its program around women artists while championing unrecognized voices and making contemporary art more accessible to a broader audience. The milestone reflects the gallery’s dedication to its artists and mission, its enduring vision, and its ability to evolve across five decades of change in the art world. In honor of this milestone, Built to Last: Fifty Years of Kathryn Markel Fine Arts will open on July 9 at the gallery’s 529 West 20th Street location. The exhibition will extend to the gallery’s 179 10th Avenue space beginning August 6. Additional anniversary programming will be announced throughout the summer.

Sep 24 - Oct 31 2026

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce Farm Flowers, an exhibition of new paintings by Arielle Zamora. This will be their second solo exhibition with the gallery and an artist reception will be held September 24th from 6-8pm. Zamora creates thoughtful, minimalist paintings that draw from both natural and built environments. Interested in the relationships between line and form, they look to the repetition found in architecture and nature to bring structure and a sense of calm to their compositions. Mixing paint with joint compound and applying it in layers, they sand, scrape, and score the surface to create rhythmic linear forms. The measured, repeating lines are carved through the surface to reveal colors from the layers beneath. There is precision in the work but it is never entirely perfect. Evidence of the hand remains visible throughout the seemingly immaculate facade. Farm Flowers brings a new influence to the forefront in Zamora’s work. For years they have worked as both an artist and a flower farmer and floral designer, while resisting the idea that the two practices overlapped. Now they have begun to embrace how naturally one informs the other: “Flower farming, like my art, is a practice in form, color, and repetition; from field prep to variety selection to harvesting the same crop day after day, so many aspects of farming are parallel to my art practice.” In these new paintings, deep earthy maroons and browns meet pastel pinks and sky blues, drawing from the colors and forms Zamora encounters every day. Horizontal and vertical lines, curved slopes, and incised, irregular lines suggest rows of fields, architectural facades, horizon lines, windows, stems, and paths. The warm palette and repetition reflect Zamora’s quiet days spent “in a hot sunny field immersed in scents and pollinators.” Arielle Zamora is a Portland, Oregon-based painter and printmaker. They received their BFA from the Oregon College of Art and Craft and exhibit widely in galleries across the United States. Alongside their studio practice they own Small Yard Flowers, a floral design studio and garden, and manage Indigo Gardens PDX, a 5-acre flower farm.

Sep 24 - Nov 07 2026

Kathryn Markel Fine Arts is pleased to announce an upcoming exhibition of new paintings by Rocío Rodríguez titled The Pulse In-Between. This is her fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. A reception for the artist will be held on September 24th from 6-8pm. Rodríguez’s abstract paintings reflect her sense of life’s transience. She writes, “Through opposing forces—heat and coolness, saturation and neutral grays, gestural mark and meditative pause—I make paintings where change isn't a single event but an ongoing condition.” Passages of color are disrupted, wiped away, struck through, dispersed, and repainted. Friction exists between temperature, density, openness, and within the act of physically marking the canvas. Rodríguez’s paintings unfold through deliberate decisions. In her own words, “Some paintings are built through layered, urgent mark-making, while others arrive at a hard-won stillness. Together, they reflect a central concern in my work: that opposites don't cancel each other out. Difference can become a source of discovery, allowing for various emotional states to be expressed.” Movement is constant, soft washes drip, frenzied marks vibrate and smudge, and flecks and splashes skitter across the canvas. These marks oscillate between soft, ethereal veils and frantic impasto. Swirls and tangles of brushstrokes intertwine to suggest sunsets, gardens, water, and sky. Rocío Rodríguez has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and museums. Her work is in numerous private and public collections including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; and the Huntsville Museum of Art, AL. Rodríguez is the recipient of various prestigious national and regional awards including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman 2018, Artadia Atlanta 2011, a Cintas Fellowship, and two Southern Arts Federation and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. In 2014 she was awarded an Artist Residency at Marfa Contemporary in Marfa, Texas. Rocío Rodríguez was born in Caibarién, Cuba. She earned her BFA and MFA from the University of Georgia and continues to live and work in Atlanta, Georgia