#miles mcenery

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04.19.25 Terry Haggerty at Miles McEnery in Chelsea.

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James Siena, "Decryptames" (2023),

Ink and graphite on paper,

Dimensions: 22 3/4 x 31 inches.

Image Courtesy Miles McEnery Gallery

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Brian Alfred’s paintings for his exhibition Beauty is A Rare Thing at Miles McEnery Gallery capture moments from his travels around the world. Small details are removed to focus on shapes and colors, resulting in works that are extremely pleasing to the eye.

From the press release-

…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.

Also included in a separate room are his portraits of contemporary musicians, pictured below.

[jgthirlwell]

04.19.25 Tracy Thomason at Miles McEnery Gallery in Chelsea

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01.05.23 Rico Gatson at Miles McEnery in Chelsea

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05.11.23 Beverly Fishman at Miles McEnery in Chelsea

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Daniel Rich at Miles McEnery Gallery

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The paintings above are from Daniel Rich’s 2020 exhibition at Miles McEnery Gallery in NYC.

From the gallery’s press release-

Daniel Rich’s reticulated cityscapes and slick façades appear at first glance to be quite literally superficial. Whether it is a geometric exterior pressed close to the picture plane or a cluster of multiple structures glimpsed from a distance, we experience architecture in his painting as a wholly exteriorized phenomenon— looming close up or made smaller through a bird’s-eye view.

His process-oriented paintings offer windows to different parts of the world— some figuratively, others much more literally—and can evoke a distorted experience of temporality for the viewer. Like compositions by Bernd and Hilla Becher or Andreas Gursky, Rich’s artworks offer clinical, complex architectural views onto the world that are filled with subtleties. However, Rich differs from Becher or Gursky in his painstaking, intricate process of translating found images into painting. The works also evoke early 20th century European Modernism, recalling Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical cityscapes and Germany’s Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) artists of the 1920s and 1930s.

Architecture, as it is commonly understood, is designed and implemented to house the human and is itself the manifestation of our constructed realities. When all signs of life are missing from buildings and spaces, as in Rich’s paintings, the result is an unsettling subversion that upends and questions what we have come to expect of both architectural spaces and the organized linearity of time. Rich probes viewers to consider what lies beyond the surface.

Rich also uses his anonymous architectural imagery to talk about history and politics. He speaks of his scenes as “failed utopias” and “changing political power structures.” In their seeming permanence, the fixed and rigid edifices that populate his work speak to a late capitalist urbanism that sees its monuments not as contingent, but as immovable and eternal.

His newest paintings are currently on view at the gallery for his exhibition Flat Earth on view until 1/28/23.