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Nov 25 - Dec 20 2025 - 20 days left

The Painting Center is pleased to present Fragile Intervals, a solo exhibition by Daniel Sutherland in the Main Gallery. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, November 25, and runs through Saturday, December 20, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, December 4, from 5 to 8 pm. Fragile Intervals features a new body of work that explores the shifting space between depiction and abstraction—between elaborate ornamentation and reductive flatness. Through oil paintings and drawings, Sutherland examines how perception and memory transform the familiar into something uncertain and strange. His compositions merge historical and contemporary references, creating images that are both structured and fluid, tangible and elusive. “Painting, for me, is an act of negotiation—between image and surface, memory and perception,” says Sutherland. “These works question what it means to depict, to ornament, to simplify, and to see.” Sutherland’s process is iterative and pluralistic, allowing depiction, abstraction, and pattern to coexist in complex tension. Many of his current works begin with imagery drawn from Western European domestic interiors—spaces lifted from art history, architecture, and design magazines—then reimagined through distortion and instability. These visual sources are fragmented, reassembled, and transformed into compositions that resist fixed interpretation, suggesting a world in motion. His influences span Dutch Still Life, Illuminated Manuscripts, Analytic Cubism, Romantic Landscape Painting, and Post-Impressionism. Each tradition informs his approach to color, shape, and spatial construction, resulting in paintings that hover between historical memory and contemporary immediacy. Daniel Sutherland received his MFA from Syracuse University and his BFA from James Madison University. He lives and works in Austin, Texas, and is represented by Moody Gallery in Houston. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States, including in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Antonio, Houston, and the Dallas–Fort Worth area. For more information on the artist, visit: @dansutherlandstudio.

Nov 25 - Dec 20 2025 - 20 days left

The Painting Center is pleased to present Paintings, a solo exhibition by Will Duty in the Project Room. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, November 25, and remains on view through Saturday, December 20, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, December 4, from 5 to 8 pm. In this exhibition, Will Duty presents a set of entirely black-and-white oil paintings. Following earlier work, there is a consistent "abstract noir" sensibility of embedding abstract forms into fields of black. The transition to paint from his earlier graphite works seems a straightforward one: the heavy lead-like graphite of early work was supplanted by the gumminess of oil paint. In somewhat of a departure, a dimension of lightness is explored, rather than the customary black; forms are sometimes embedded into white, rather than allowing medium tones of gray to stand on their own, delicate, exposed, and not always operating under the cover of dark. Two pieces, a pair of rays, are even done as literal inversions. There are two scales: the bulk are larger oil paintings on conventional stretched canvas, which obsess over hard-edge geometric angularity, mostly zigzags of extreme acuteness, incorporating soft gradients within the allocated spaces. Perhaps acting as a color substitute, an attempt to make as lush a thing as possible while denying the obvious tool to do so, or to dampen the aggressive spikiness. The volumes vary from maximally open parallelograms to maximally closed, shut down to become single lines, almost but not entirely occluding their content. A few smaller pieces explore seeming details of the human form, with subdued intimacy, chiaroscuro, or Impressionism. There is a hint of public versus private between the two subsets. Regardless of medium, the thinking follows similar pathways: a striving to achieve minimalist, even ascetic goals with obsessive and maximalist tools. No matter how complex something is, it should still be simple. Each work tries to resolve as one visual idea, singular, almost expressible as a sentence, as if following a Sol Lewitt "instruction". The range of moods and references spans from the intimate, the human form, to the possibly vast and impersonal, suggestions of skies, clouds, stars, and familiar elements of the artist's lexicon. For more information on the artist, visit: @willdutyartist.

Nov 25 - Dec 20 2025 - 20 days left

The Painting Center is pleased to present Arcadia, a solo exhibition by Emma Tapley in the Main Gallery. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, November 25, and runs through Saturday, December 20, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, December 4, from 5 to 8 pm. In Arcadia, Emma Tapley immerses herself in the familial landscape and situates her practice within the long tradition of landscape painting in the Catskills. Painted directly from life on land once tended by her father, a painter who shaped her earliest understanding of art, the series transforms personal inheritance into philosophy. Each work captures the fleeting transitions of the natural world, the movement of air across water, the shift of shadow through branches, and the quiet passage of time that defines a living place. Tapley’s paintings hold these moments with extraordinary stillness, exploring the balance between observation and emotion, between the world perceived and the world remembered. Arcadia is not a retreat from life but a deep participation in it, a sustained practice of looking through which transience becomes form and the passing moment finds continuity. Tapley’s art continues the American landscape tradition begun by Thomas Cole and developed through the quiet precision of Luminism and the inward spirituality of George Inness. Yet her Arcadia belongs fully to the present. Her vision is neither nostalgic nor idealized; it emerges from the act of direct observation, from patient hours of attention until the world begins to clarify itself through paint. Horizons soften, reflections merge with reality, and trees blur into the haze of their own movement. Each painting becomes a record of perception unfolding in real time, a conversation between artist, place, and moment. Tapley’s connection to the Catskills is both intimate and enduring. The land she paints was once her father’s, and caring for it after his passing became a form of devotion. “At first it felt like I was still caring for him,” she recalls, “but now I am caring for the place itself.” That quiet responsibility shapes her entire practice. Her canvases are less representations of landscape than acts of companionship with it. In this way, Arcadia extends the pastoral lineage of American painting into a contemporary language of presence. Tapley’s work reminds us that painting remains a vital means of recording how we see and how seeing connects us to the living world. Her landscapes do not seek paradise; they locate it in the quiet persistence of seeing. Emma Tapley is an American painter whose work explores perception, memory, and the natural world. She studied at The School of Visual Arts and has exhibited widely throughout the United States. Tapley divides her time between New York City and her Catskills home, where she continues to expand the expressive and philosophical language of landscape painting. For more information on the artist, visit: emmatapley.net and @emmatapleystudio.