Night Gallery is pleased to present The Big Picture, a group exhibition featuring twelve contemporary painters whose expansive gestural, material, and conceptual ambitions play out on a large scale: Radcliffe Bailey, Sarah Blaustein, Andrea Marie Breiling, Nigel Cooke, Márcia Falcão, Iva Gueorguieva, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Carrie Moyer, Robert Nava, Kaveri Raina, Hasani Sahlehe, and Janaina Tschäpe. The exhibition will be on view at Night Gallery North from November 11 through December 22, 2023.

Both participating in and expanding the history of abstraction, multiple artists in The Big Picture demonstrate the evolving influence of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting while also developing their own inventive techniques for removing the artist’s hand. Andrea Marie Breiling renders kinetic works of abstraction using spray paint, an unexpected medium that has become her signature. Sweeping marks invoke the artist’s full body, as complex layers of color establish an ethereal tone. Sarah Blaustein repurposes tools of domestic labor for her artistic practice, using household items such as sponges, brooms, buckets, and housepainters’ brushes or rags to apply ink and acrylic paint to canvas. The process becomes what Blaustein has described as a “bodily dance” in which she attempts to capture momentary sensations and achieve a meditative state. Kaveri Raina paints on the front and back of stretched burlap, allowing pigments to bleed through the material’s textured surface. The resulting overlapping shapes appear as ominous shadows or maps of mysterious psychological terrain.

Artists such as Iva Gueorguieva, Nigel Cooke, and Janaina Tschäpe blend mediums and forms, often combining elements of abstraction and figuration. Integrating materials such as gauze on her paintings’ surfaces, Guergouieva looks to the materialism of Art Povera, the physicality of Gutai, and the playfulness of Cubist collage to create works layered with palimpsests and partially visible images. Cooke subverts classical painting techniques of spatial depth to create works that convey the complexities of brain circuitry, human anatomy, and the natural world, while Janaina Tschäpe’s dreamlike paintings similarly blur the lines between aquatic, plant, and human forms, referencing her interests in mythology and biological morphology.

Other painters use the medium to generate abstracted depictions of places and the complex histories they contain. In paintings composed of bold lines and blocks of bright color, Atlanta-based artist Hasani Sahlehe draws upon his experiences growing up in the Caribbean and the improvisational approaches of Black musical traditions, visually translating a charged tension between repetition and rhapsody. Radcliffe Bailey, who also lived and worked in Atlanta until his recent passing, mined his own family history to pursue broader inquiries into Black history and cultural expression. In Bailey’s monochromatic black painting Maroon—which incorporates materials such as Georgia clay and black sand—the shapes of ladders, oars, and other objects subtly protrude from the canvas while evading outright visual recognition, an apt metaphor for the obliqueness of the past. Painting with solid gestures and thick paint layers, Márcia Falcão articulates relationships between the female body and pictorial matter. Her central motif is the carioca suburbs where she grew up, lives, and works in Rio de Janeiro. She depicts fleshy bodies in tangles of brown and red, merging the unruliness of her figures with the structured grid of the canvas.

Veering from abstraction toward narrative, other artists reimagine stories from folklore and mythology—whether from received traditions or their own invented worlds. Robert Nava is known for paintings of fantastical creatures in acrylic, oil stick, and graphite pencil in blunt, kinetic lines, overlaid with spray paint. These creatures merge mythological characters that have persisted over millennia (gryphons, dragons, and witches, among others) with impulsive contemporary flourishes (airplanes, buses, electric currents, flamethrowers). Nava’s monsters offer new archetypes of the present day, intuitively combining ancient folklore with the mundane machinery of twenty-first-century life. In The Invocation of Queen Mab, Carrie Moyer celebrates a figure described as “the fairies’ midwife” in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet who would, in later representations, be portrayed as “the queen of the fairies.” Showing fiery washes of color descending from two dome-like shapes above a glittery grayscale sea, Moyer’s painting brings a sense of the theatrical and a distinctively feminine perspective to a medium and scale that have often historically been associated with macho bravado. 

Informed by comic books, cartoons, and film, Trenton Doyle Hancock has developed his own fantastical universe known as the “Moundverse” across works in painting, sculpture, and other mediums. In Bringback Condiments: Ketchup, Hancock depicts characters known as the “Bringbacks,” mouthless, fur-striped humanoids who serve a nostalgic function: they "bring back" memories from childhood. For Hancock, the Bringbacks allow him to revisit formative influences on his creation of the Moundverse.

Across this range of styles and subject matter, the paintings in The Big Picture assert each artist’s own distinctive visual language. What unites these works is not aesthetic, conceptual or technical, but a spirit of unbridled ambition. Through each of their idiosyncratic approaches, each artist asserts that there is still space to explore within the enterprise of painting.

Radcliffe Bailey (b. 1968, Bridgetown, NJ) incorporates found objects and photographs into  textured compositions that address race, ancestry, migration, and collective memory, linking  diasporic histories with potential futures. Solo exhibitions include Passages at Knoxville Museum  (2022), Ascents and Echoes at Jack Shainman Gallery (2021) Travelogue at Jack Shainman  Gallery | The School, New York (2018); Radcliffe Bailey: Recent Works, Contemporary Arts Center,  New Orleans (2015); and Memory as Medicine at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta (2011-12).  Bailey’s work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Smithsonian  Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Art Institute of Chicago; among others. Bailey lives and works in  Atlanta, Georgia.

Sarah Blaustein (b. 1982, San Francisco East Bay, CA) has had recent solo exhibitions at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art San José, San José, CA; private showing at PACE Gallery, Palo Alto, CA; and Hesse Flatow Gallery, New York, NY. Her work has been included in group shows at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Paul Thiebaud Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and Hesse Flatow East Gallery, Amagansett, NY. In 2025, Blaustein will present solo exhibitions at Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA and Hesse Flatow Gallery, New York, NY. Blaustein lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Andrea Marie Breiling (b. Phoenix, AZ) received her BFA in Studio Art and Gender Studies from UC Irvine in 2008 and her MFA in Studio Art from Claremont Graduate University in 2014. She has had solo exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Almine Rech in Beijing, China; Brussels, Belgium; London, United Kingdom; and New York, New York; Broadway Gallery, New York; Achenbach Hagemeier, Düsseldorf, Germany; Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont, CA; and Sonce Alexander Gallery, Los Angeles, CA. Breiling has participated in group shows at  Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA; Carl Kostyál Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden; Collaborations, Copenhagen, Denmark; Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY; Various Small Fires, Seoul, Korea; and Wilding Cran Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, among others. Her work belongs in the public collections of CVG Foundation, Beijing, China; Dangxia Art Foundation, Beijing, China; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; Deji Art Museum, Nanjing, China; Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, Miami, FL; and X Museum, Beijing, China. Breiling has been featured in several publications, including Abstract, Artforum, Cultured, GQ Style, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and Whitewall. Breiling lives and works in the New York metropolitan area.

Nigel Cooke (b. 1973, Manchester, United Kingdom) is known for evocative works that merge figurative forms with abstract and elemental atmospherics. Since the late 1990s, Cooke has explored and stretched the boundaries of figurative painting, creating a highly diverse and distinctive body of work. More recently, his work has assessed this output, moving into a succinct language with which to investigate his wide range of interests. The artist has presented solo exhibitions at galleries and institutions including Pace Gallery, London, Palm Beach, Geneva, and Seoul; Blum and Poe, Los Angeles, CA; Buchmann Galerie, Berlin, Germany; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; and Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; The Warehouse, Dallas, TX; Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, Mexico; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY, and other galleries and institutions. His paintings are held in several of the world’s major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Tate Gallery, London, United Kingdom; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo, Norway; and Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI. The artist lives and works in London and Kent, United Kingdom.

Márcia Falcão (b. 1985, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) has had recent solo exhibitions at Instituto Incusartiz, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, Brazil; Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Galeria Aymoré, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; MAR – Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; SESC Pompéia, São Paulo, Brazil; and New York Latin American Art Triennial, New York, NY, among other galleries and institutions. Her work belongs in the permanent collections of the Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil and The Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. 

Iva Gueorguieva (b. 1974, Sofia, Bulgaria) has an upcoming show Night gallery, LA in 2024. Select solo exhibitions and projects include Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, CA; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; Bradwolff Projects, Amsterdam, NL; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles, CA; ACME, Los Angeles, CA; Frederic Snitzer, Miami, FL; Pomona Museum of Art, Claremont, CA. Notable group shows include: CAM, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. Her work is included in the public collections of museums including, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, MN; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; University Art Museum, California State University, Long Beach, CA; Art, Design and Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA; Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY and Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, CA. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Trenton Doyle Hancock (b. 1974) For almost two decades, Trenton Doyle Hancock (b. 1974, Oklahoma City, OK) has been constructing his own fantastical  narrative that continues to develop and inform his prolific artistic output. Part fictional, part  autobiographical, Hancock’s work pulls from his own personal experience, art historical canon,  comics and superheroes, pulp fiction, and myriad pop culture references, resulting in a complex  amalgamation of characters and plots. Hancock  earned his BFA from Texas A&M University, Commerce, and his MFA from the Tyler School of Art  at Temple University, Philadelphia. Hancock was featured in the 2000 and 2002 Whitney Biennial  exhibitions, at the time becoming one of the youngest artists in history to participate in the  prestigious survey. In 2014, his exhibition, Skin & Bones: 20 Years of Drawing, at the  Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston traveled to Akron Art Museum, OH; Studio Museum in  Harlem, NY; and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, VA. In 2019, a major exhibition of his  work, Mind of the Mound: Critical Mass, opened at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA. His work has been the subject of solo  exhibitions at Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Menil Collection, Houston TX; Temple Contemporary,  Philadelphia, PA; the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO; the Ringling Museum of Art,  Sarasota, FL; the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL; the  Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah and Atlanta, GA; The Weatherspoon Museum,  Greensboro, NC; The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. TX; and The Museum of Contemporary Art,  North Miami, FL. Hancock’s work is in the permanent collections of several prestigious museums, including the  Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; the  Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Studio Museum, New York, NY; Brooklyn  Museum, Brooklyn, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, TX;  the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth,  TX. The recipient of numerous awards, Trenton Doyle Hancock lives and works in Houston, Texas.

Carrie Moyer (b. 1960, Detroit, Michigan) is known for her vibrant paintings and works on paper, which critically interrogate the formal and conceptual conventions of painting while embracing an approach to abstraction rooted in optical pleasure. Moyer’s work has been widely exhibited in one-person and group presentations, including Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times, Portland Museum of Art, ME (2020), traveled to Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2021); Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny, The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY (2013); traveled to Canzani Center Gallery, Columbus College of Art and Design, OH (2014); and SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2014); Carrie Moyer: Interstellar, Worcester Art Museum, MA (2012); and Carrie Moyer: Painting Propaganda, American University Museum at the Katzen Center for the Arts, Washington, D.C. (2009), among others. Other recent exhibitions include Queer Abstraction, Des Moines Art Center, IA (2019), traveled to Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, KS (2019); Aftereffect: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Painting, Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO (2019); Inherent Structures, Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2018); Whitney Biennial 2017, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Agitprop!, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2015), among others. The artist’s works are represented in prominent collections, including Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; Des Moines Art Center, IA; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA; Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, Perugia, Italy (2019); National Academician, National Academy of Design (2019); American Academy of Arts & Letters (2018); Guggenheim Fellowship (2013): Anonymous Was A Woman (2009); and Art Matters Fellowship (1994). Moyer is a Professor and the Co-Director of the graduate studio program at Hunter College in New York. She is also on the Board of Governors at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Moyer lives and works in Brooklyn.

Robert Nava (b. 1985, East Chicago, Indiana) earned a BFA in Fine Art from Indiana University in 2008 as well as an MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2011. His practice centers on large-scale paintings and works on paper that portray whimsical creatures, rendered through gestural markings. Finding inspiration in the art of the distant past, from Medieval Christian imagery to Mayan and Sumerian art, as well as popular contemporary sources such as animation, Nava creates compositions that are carefully considered yet marked by a sense of naivete and spontaneity. His art has been exhibited in various solo exhibitions both domestically and abroad, including Robert Nava: STAND, The Watermill Center, New York (2022); Bloodsport, Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Robert Nava: Thunderbolt Disco, Pace Gallery, London (2022); Robert Nava, Pace Palm Beach (2021); Robert Nava: Angels, Vito Schnabel Gallery, New York (2021); and Robert Nava, Sorry We’re Closed in Brussels, Belgium (2020). Nava’s work is held in public collections worldwide including the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Musée d'Art Modern, Paris; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; and Perez Art Museum, Miami Florida, among others. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Kaveri Raina (b.1990, New Delhi, India) received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. Select solo and group exhibitions include: Songs of silence, yet bluebirds hum (2023), PATRON, Chicago, IL;  A soft place to land (2023), Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Cleveland, OH; Deep! Down! Inside! (2023) Hales Gallery, New York, NY;  Kaveri Raina and Coral Saucedo Lomelí: What Do You Remember About the Earth (2023), Lighthouse Works, NY; image as a burden, death as a womb (2022), Chapter NY, New York, NY; Heft (2022), PATRON, Chicago, IL; E/Merge: Art of the Indian Diaspora (2021), National Indo-American Museum, Lombard, IL; Partings, Swaying to the Moon (2020), PATRON, Chicago, IL; NO LACKS, ME AND MY SHADOW (2020), M+B Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; A Space for Monsters  (2021), Twelve Gates Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Hildur Ásgeirsdóttir Jónsson and Kaveri Raina (2020), Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, OH; Linger to Gaze (2019), Annarumma Gallery, Naples, Italy; Linger Still (2019), Assembly Room, New York, NY; Here or There (2019), Paolo Arao, Rata Projects, New York, NY; Sarah.Canright / Kaveri.Raina (2019), Permanent Collection/Co-Lab Projects, Austin, TX; spaceless (2019), Deli Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Paint School (2019), Shandaken Projects, Klaus von Nichtssagend, New York, NY; garcia, raina, shore, tossin (2019) at Luhring Augustine, New York; Pleasure at a Distance (2018), Irvine Fine Arts Center, Irvine, CA. Raina has received several fellowships and awards including the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship, the Ox-bow Residency Award, and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture Fellowship Award.

Hasani Sahlehe (b. 1991) Hasani Sahlehe (b. 1991, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands) grew up among four-generations of musicians, educators, artists, and fervent preservers of local history and culture. He graduated from  Savannah College of Art and Design in 2015. His practice investigates perception by exploring  color and the materiality of paint.  His work is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Atlanta Contemporary. Sahlehe has  exhibited internationally and had recent solo exhibitions at Tif Sigfrids (Athens, GA), SCAD  Museum of Art (Savannah, GA), Adams and Ollman (Portland, OR), Tops Gallery (Memphis, TN),  Laney Contemporary (Savannah, GA), Gallery 12.26 (Dallas, TX), among others. Sahlehe lives and  works in Atlanta, Georgia.

Janaina Tschäpe (b. 1973, Munich, Germany) is a German-Brazilian artist whose multidisciplinary body of work has  encompassed painting, drawing, photography, video, and sculpture. Her photography and performance often involve the  artist, or other bodies, interacting with or depicting the coastal and riparian landscapes of Brazil. In  her paintings, Tschäpe takes inspiration from her memories of these spaces to create her large scale abstract paintings. Tschäpe holds an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York and a BFA from the Hochschule  für Bildende Künste, Hamburg, Germany. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Den  Frie Center of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark; the Sarasota Art Museum, Florida; the  Musée L’Orangerie, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona; the Kasama Nichido  Museum of Art, Kasama, Japan; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, and the  Contemporary Museum of Art, St Louis. Tschäpe’s solo exhibition I Am My Own Landscape is  currently on view at the CAC Málaga, Spain. Tschäpe’s work has also been featured in numerous group exhibitions at venues including The  Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland; NCA Taipei, Taiwan; Whitechapel Gallery, London; TBA21- Augarten, Vienna, Austria; CCBB, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Centre D’Art Contemporain de  Normandie, France; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Nanazawa, Japan; Instituto  Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; National Museum of  Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Pratt Manhattan Gallery; OCA Museu da Cidade, São Paulo;  Kunsthal Kade, Netherlands; Cidade Matarazzo, São Paulo, Brazil; Ronnebaeksholm, Denmark;  Cultural Centro Banco do Brazil in Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Museum of Fine Arts Boston,  Massachusetts; and Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, Taiwan. Tchäpe’s work is found in important public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France;  Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge,  Massachusetts; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Moderna Museet, Stockholm,  Sweden; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna, Austria; and the Solomon R.  Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., among  others. Tschäpe lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.