DANIELLE MYSLIWIEC

March 25 - May 10, 2026

Featuring: Paolo Arao, Courtney Childress, Mark Joshua Epstein, Nicholas Moenich, Danielle Mysliwiec, Cyle Warner

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Abstraction has often been understood as a language of reduction: a withdrawal from narrative, a movement toward structure, system, and a pure form. Yet the works gathered in Soft Structures suggest something more complex. Across painting, textile, relief, and material construction, these works by Paolo Arao, Courtney Childress, Mark Joshua Epstein, Nicholas Moenich, Danielle Mysliwiec, and Cyle Warner approach abstraction not as a way to articulate an experience. Geometry, repetition, pattern, and chromatic force hold the meaning in suspension, encoding it and then emplifying it.

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What emerges across the exhibition is a shared visual thinking. Rather than depicting an essence directly, these artists construct formal systems through which reality evokes. Shape becomes a unit of thought; Color — a declaration; Surface — a site where material, image, and the story meet. The works propose a vocabulary rather than an illustration, and each artist develops that vocabulary according to a distinct internal logic.

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The title Soft Structures points to one of the exhibition’s central paradoxes. These works are often rigorous in composition, highly disciplined in process, and deeply invested in the ordering abstraction. Yet they resist an impersonal rhetoric associated with modernist form. The artworks bend toward memory, domesticity, inherited craft, coded identity, and improvisational making. If earlier abstraction often sought autonomy, the works in this exhibition insist on relation to the body, ancestry, labor, and the image-world of the present.

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Across the exhibition, one further condition binds these artists: a commitment to craftsmanship as thought. Labor is what allows each artist to build a visual vocabulary adequate to the complexity of their concerns. The works insist that form is never only formal. It is worked, negotiated, and accumulated. It carries time. 

In an era shaped by the rapid circulation of images, these works also acquire an additional charge. They enter a world in which artworks are seen as a reproduction of reality. Yet rather than denying, they complicate it. They present themselves as visually compelling imagery, while exceeding image through scale, texture, and density. Soft Structures thus proposes abstraction as a mode of relation rather than withdrawal. These artists do not escape the world through form; they rebuild it through form