Boundless

Featuring the work of ten artists whose compositions embrace the limitless vocabulary of abstraction, Boundless is a meditation on freedom of form, gesture, and perception. Curated by Paul Efstathiou, Director of Hollis Taggart Downtown, the exhibition will showcase the work of gallery artists, André Hemer, Dana James, and Osamu Kobayashi as well as Elizabeth Abel, Chellis Baird, Katherine Boxall, Joanne Greenbaum, Margaux Ogden, Matt Phillips, and Kelly Worman. More than a celebration, Boundless marks a renewed commitment to the gallery’s ongoing mission: to champion artists whose practices move with and against the grain of tradition, pressing toward ever-expanding possibilities.

The works in Boundless resist categorization. They pulse with rhythm, experiment with texture, and speak across language and lineage. Here, abstraction becomes a site for sensation, a staging ground for emotion, memory, tension, and transformation. Each artist explores a different inflection of the word freedom, whether that be as material expression, conceptual fluidity, or inner release. Together, the works form a prismatic whole attuned to a sense of now.

Artists Osamu Kobayashi, Katherine Boxall, and Matt Phillips approach abstraction through movement and play, demonstrating how form can be both deliberate and alive. Kobayashi’s bold, biomorphic shapes float within intricately and methodically layered backgrounds, slyly nodding to surrealist humor and bodily landscape. Through entangled mark-making that is part gestural and part atmospheric, Boxall’s work unfolds in cascades of color, drawing from nature without replicating its contours. Phillips, working with pastel pigments and silica, evokes shifting terrains with rippling surfaces and rhythmic color relationships, inviting the viewer into a space that is at once extraordinary and familiar.

In contrast, Kelly Worman and Chellis Baird explore abstraction through physical intimacy with materials. With the use of satin and vibrant pigments, Worman conjures visceral references to the female body and the energetic choreography of gesture, rhythm, and relational experience. Baird, on the other hand, weaves, knots, and paints her hand-sculpted canvases, collapsing distinctions between textile, sculpture, and painting. Through this haptic language, both artists reflect on the body’s presence in the digital age, where tactility becomes a radical form of remembrance.

The ability to present the challenging dualities of our world with abstraction as a conduit for contradiction is highlighted within the exhibition. Dana James’ pieces flicker between opacity and shimmer, permanence and ephemerality. Her hybrid surfaces, embedded with recycled canvas, tin foil, and iridescent wax, evoke the elusive sensation of memory’s glow. Furthering the exploration of dichotomies, Elizabeth Abel’s restraint is equally charged as flowers dissolve into gestures, softened by water, held within lines that feelboth invasive and intimate. Her work balances control and instinct, a visual language that toes the edge of vulnerability.

Meanwhile, Margaux Ogden and Joanne Greenbaum rethink abstraction through the manipulation of structure. Ogden’s intricate patterns hum with repetition and deviation, creating a visual harmony that is almost hallucinatory. Greenbaum’s layered compositions, part drawing, part architecture, intertwine spontaneity with psychological depth. In contrast, we are also presented with the work of André Hemer, who merges traditional painting with digital scans, constructing hybrid surfaces that echo our image-saturated culture. In their own ways, each artist is reconfiguring how form is built, broken, and perceived. 

Boundless offers an entry point into abstraction not as a historical category, but as an ever-evolving conversation. The exhibition asks viewers to move through sensation and encounter, to witness the fluid, fractured, and embodied ways that contemporary abstraction speaks. In this new space, the works do not seek resolution; they breathe. In doing so, Hollis Taggart Downtown opens up a space for interpretation, play, and uncontainable possibility for this cohort of abstract painters.

For more information about Boundless, please contact us at info@hollistaggart.com or +1 212.628.4000.

For press inquiries, please contact Aga Sablinska at aga.sablinska@gmail.com or +1 862.216.6485.