Group Exhibition

Playing

Playing
A group exhibition curated by Marcus Jahmal with Zoë Argires, Katherine Bradford, Bianca Fields, Gerasimos Floratos, Lloyd Foster, Tamara Gonzales, Bendix Harms, David Humphrey, Marcus Jahmal, Char Jeré, Kiki Joyce, Little Walt Dog, Chris Martin, Abbott Stillman, Antonio Vidal, and Zach Wollard
Eighteen | August 21 – September 26, 2026

Inspired by Philip Guston's assertion that "this serious play, which we call art, can't be static." Playing brings together sixteen artists committed to continual invention — building worlds only to dismantle and rebuild them again. The exhibition takes its cues from the spirit of the CoBrA movement, embracing spontaneity, intuition, primal gesture, folk traditions, art brut, and a resistance to allowing style to calcify into a fixed identity. The painters in Playing share CoBrA's sense of the studio as a site of experimentation, where instinct and imagination carry as much weight as intellect and where painting itself becomes a form of play. Collective energy, too, is central to the group's spirit here, bringing together artists whose individual visual languages exist in conversation with one another while remaining entirely their own. Across the exhibition, color, gesture, and mark-making become tools of discovery, revealing painters who remain deeply engaged in a dialogue with their inner child and unafraid to explore the unknown. Playing presents an eclectic group whose work is animated by movement, curiosity, invention, and the enduring possibility of magic.

—Text by Marcus Jahmal, New York City, summer 2026

Zoë Argires (b. 1996, Birmingham, Alabama) is an interdisciplinary artist whose paintings and sculptural works combine abstraction, symbolism, and personal mythology. Her practice explores the relationship between memory, spirituality, and material transformation. 

Katherine Bradford (b. 1942, New York) is an American painter based in Brooklyn and Maine whose luminous paintings of swimmers, superheroes, and dreamlike figures occupy a space between abstraction and representation. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and numerous other institutions. 

Bianca Fields (b. 1995, Cleveland, Ohio) is a painter whose work explores color, symbolism, and gesture through richly textured compositions that draw upon both abstraction and figuration.

Gerasimos Floratos (b. 1986, New York) is a New York-based artist whose energetic paintings and drawings draw inspiration from city life, music, sports, graffiti, and popular culture. His work balances improvisation with a keen sensitivity to rhythm and movement.

Lloyd Foster (b. 1990, Washington D.C.) is a painter whose work explores perception, symbolism, and memory through layered compositions that balance spontaneity with careful observation.

Tamara Gonzales (b. 1959, Madera, California) is a Brooklyn-based painter whose vibrant, mystical works are informed by folk traditions, craft, spirituality, music, and abstraction. She is celebrated for her richly layered surfaces and symbolic visual language.

Bendix Harms (b. 1967, Hamburg, Germany) is known for exuberant paintings and sculptures that merge architecture, landscape, folklore, and abstraction. His work often transforms familiar spaces into strange and theatrical environments. Harms’ work is represented in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; MoCA, Los Angeles and SFMoMA.

David Humphrey (b. 1955) is an American painter, writer, and educator whose influential practice combines figuration, abstraction, humor, and cultural critique. He’s currently teaching the MFA program at Columbia University. His work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Saatchi Gallery, London.

Marcus Jahmal (b. 1990, Brooklyn, New York) is an artist whose paintings, sculptures, and drawings combine memory, mythology, and observations of everyday life into richly layered compositions. Working fluidly between abstraction and representation, Jahmal draws upon the visual languages of graffiti, folk traditions, ritual, music, and art history to construct deeply personal worlds populated by recurring symbols and figures. 

Char Jéré (b. 1983, Rochester, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work combines painting, drawing, and symbolic imagery to create deeply personal and psychologically charged compositions.

Kiki Joyce (b. 2000, New York) is an artist and curator whose paintings combine humor, storytelling, and observations drawn from everyday life. Her work often blurs the boundary between the real and the imagined.

L.W.D – Little Walt Dog (b. 1957, Compton, California) is a self-taught artist whose idiosyncratic paintings and drawings draw equally from folk art, cartoons, music, and the energy of everyday life, creating a highly personal and immediately recognizable visual language.

Chris Martin (b. 1954, Washington D.C.) is an American painter known for expansive, emotionally resonant works that combine abstraction, symbolism, and found materials. Drawing from sources as varied as mysticism, popular culture, and art history, his paintings embrace both sincerity and experimentation.

Abbott Stillman (b. 1947) is a painter recognized for his lyrical compositions and subtle use of color, drawing upon traditions of modernism while maintaining a distinctly contemporary sensibility.

Antonio Vidal (b. 1996, Mexico City, Mexico) is a painter whose work explores mythology, religion, symbolism, and personal narrative. Moving fluidly between abstraction and figuration, his paintings investigate the relationship between the sacred, the everyday, and the imaginative. 

Zach Wollard (b. 1974, New York) is a New York-based painter whose work blends landscape, abstraction, and memory through an intuitive approach to color, surface, and gesture. His work is found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.