A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops, and grids. Originally trained in classical, figurative painting, Christensen later sought to transcend stylistic restrictions, experimenting throughout his career with an array of tools to apply paint, including rollers, squeegees, brooms, and weed-sprayers. In highly acclaimed early work he used spray guns to paint over square and looping pieces of tape, then removed the tape to create swirls and grids of color with shimmering surface effects. He also painted saturated fields of color under coats of white or dark paint, scraping away some of the top layer to reveal the bright pigment beneath, as well as plaid patterns and calligraphic marks. Christensen considered the works of Jackson Pollock and the Color Field Painters to be major influences on his practice.

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops, and grids. Originally trained in classical, figurative painting, Christensen later sought to transcend stylistic restrictions, experimenting throughout his career with an array of tools to apply paint, including rollers, squeegees, brooms, and weed-sprayers. In highly acclaimed early work he used spray guns to paint over square and looping pieces of tape, then removed the tape to create swirls and grids of color with shimmering surface effects. He also painted saturated fields of color under coats of white or dark paint, scraping away some of the top layer to reveal the bright pigment beneath, as well as plaid patterns and calligraphic marks. Christensen considered the works of Jackson Pollock and the Color Field Painters to be major influences on his practice.

Although he socialized with such famous abstract expressionist artists as Lee Krasner and Robert Motherwell, Doug Ohlson creates paintings that are restrained and geometric in nature. His Color Field canvases are inspired by the saturated swaths of open sky and flat land in Iowa, where he was born during the Great Depression. As New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has observed, “The staple of his formal vocabulary was repeating vertical bars that seemed, increasingly, to levitate before clouds of vibrant contrasting color.” Ohlson studied under the minimalist artist Tony Smith at Hunter College in New York, where he himself started teaching in 1964.

JM Rizzi is a Brooklyn-born and Dallas-based artist working in large-scale murals, public sculpture installations, and mixed-media canvases. A gestural expressionist since he started writing graffiti as a teenager in New York City in the 1990s, Rizzi’s ever-growing practice explores abstraction through illegal art forms and movement. He has painted murals in New York; Borås, Sweden; and Shenzhen, China; and produced limited-run collections with Infinite Objects and Detroit-based publisher 1xRun. Rizzi’s practice skips, slides, and glides across surfaces, leaving behind polished paintings. His work produces exchanges between sight and sound and between positive and negative space, drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as jazz music, Robert Motherwell, Wu-Tang Clan, and Texas sunsets.

Claiming, “I probably use more paint than anybody in the history of art,” Holton Rower, grandson of Alexander Calder, is best known for his “pour paintings,” created by pouring up to 50 gallons of rainbow-colored paints over variously configured blocks and panels of plywood, and allowing it to spread and pool into textured, psychedelic compositions. He grew up surrounded by art and working in his father’s construction business, where he learned about the qualities of a range of materials. In his own studio, he experiments with many techniques and media, including sculpture, installation, and assemblage. In the early 2000s, Rower began developing his “pour paintings,” which he equates to sculptures. Ranging from small- to large-scale, and appearing as vortexes or the ringed segments of tree trunks, they are records of control and chance, human ingenuity and natural forces.

Donald Baechler, a member of the East Village art scene in 1980s New York, is known for his painting-collage-drawing works depicting of childhood imagery and nostalgic ephemera like grammar school primers, old maps, and children’s drawings, or purposely cliché motifs such as a skull, a rose, a globe, and a soccer ball. Although critics have suggested that Baechler’s work, reminiscent of Jean Dubuffet, is a critique of innocence and sincerity, Baechler sees himself as an abstract artist whose concerns are primarily formal, rooted in line, shape, color, and composition. A 2011 solo exhibition included bronze sculptures based on childlike silhouettes of flowers as well as numerous faux-naïf black-and-white flower paintings. Baechler is often associated with other East Village artists, including Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf.

Max Steven Grossman is a keen observer of bookshelves, which he captures and memorializes in large-scale photography. An MFA graduate of New York University and the International Center for Photography, Grossman is known for his “Bookscapes” series, in which he photographs stacks of books in shops, libraries, and private collections and digitally stitches the images together to form composite shelves around subjects like fashion, architecture, music, or sports. The hyperreality of these compositions is enhanced by their scale, which can reach heights of more than eight feet. Grossman’s works respond to the impact of the digital era on both books and photography, while exploring notions of reality and fantasy and the constructed nature of knowledge.

Max Steven Grossman is a keen observer of bookshelves, which he captures and memorializes in large-scale photography. An MFA graduate of New York University and the International Center for Photography, Grossman is known for his “Bookscapes” series, in which he photographs stacks of books in shops, libraries, and private collections and digitally stitches the images together to form composite shelves around subjects like fashion, architecture, music, or sports. The hyperreality of these compositions is enhanced by their scale, which can reach heights of more than eight feet. Grossman’s works respond to the impact of the digital era on both books and photography, while exploring notions of reality and fantasy and the constructed nature of knowledge.

Leighton’s close and conjectural explorations are about environments both natural and constructed. Travelling between ancient cities and the most futuristic developments of Hong Kong and the Middle East, he works with buildings and cityscapes which are part of an international iconography - and those that are more hidden from the tourist’s gaze. The elaborate images he then creates, ask about our cities and what they might become. He raises questions about how we live and move within the urban centre, how populations can cope and adapt to challenging expansion and change. In posing these questions, the images are nonetheless beautiful; Leighton seeks beauty in everything, from functional buildings to the most ornate architecture. He repeats motifs in unexpected places, repositions existing structures and contrasts the natural and the artificial: bright city lights set against natural night skies, concrete against greenery, business against eerie nighttime stillness.

Characterizing herself as a Constructivist-turned-Minimalist, who “can’t do anything else” but make art, Jane Manus produces abstract sculptures that punctuate the spaces into which they are set with their brightly colored surfaces and bold forms. Her three-dimensional constructions—ranging from furniture to wall-mounted pieces to freestanding, monumental works—spring from rough sketches. While she has experimented with wood and steel, she turned exclusively to aluminum early in her career. Manus cites early Constructivist sculpture, Minimalism, Modern architecture, and bridges among her influences, as well as fellow sculptors Marc di Suvero and Anthony Caro. In her works, she explores symmetry, balance, and form through carefully positioned geometric shapes, often squares and rectangles, and linear forms. At once industrial and organic, the hard angles and highly finished surfaces of her pieces are softened by references to the human body and nature.

Donald Martiny creates large-scale paintings that suggest gestural marks of paint directly applied to the wall, paying tribute to the energetic motion of action painting. In 2014, Martiny had a solo show at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art. He received a commission the following year to create two paintings for One World Trade Center, which are permanently installed in the tower’s ground floor lobby where they appear to shift in color depending on the day’s light. An alumnus of the School of Visual Arts, the Art Students League of New York, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Martiny began developing his signature style in the late 1990s. His paintings are collected by institutions like the Crocker Art Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, and the Lamborghini Museum Mudetec in Bologna, Italy.

Udo Nöger aims to bring out the luminescence of paint in his practice. The artist is known for monochromatic gray works that give the impression of emitting light. Nöger achieves this effect by stretching multiple pieces of fabric or canvas onto one frame; he either paints on or cuts shapes into the different layers beforehand. As a result, the work appears lighter and more transparent in certain parts. Nöger has also been known to paint on the underside of the fabric, and to use materials of varying thickness and opacity.

James Austin Murray’s mysterious, meditative paintings are almost exclusively produced in Ivory Black oil paint. His command of color and brushstroke produces rippling abstract canvases that resemble machine-milled steel, Zen gardens, or the play of light across glass in a dark room. Murray, who worked for years as a firefighter, explains that his painting practice is a way to meditate on his connection to the earth, which is enhanced by his use of handmade brushes and pigments he makes himself out of soil sourced from sites with personal or cultural importance. Murray has exhibited in New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Singapore, Monaco, Chicago, and Miami. His works are in the collections of the Kimpton Hotel Palomar Philadelphia, Tom Ford, and Thomas Pheasant in Washington D.C.

Israeli-born artist Boaz Vaadia gained worldwide acclaim for his humanoid sculptures composed of layered stacks of stone. In 1975, after graduating from Tel Aviv’s Avni Institute of Art and Design, where he also taught from 1972 to 1974, Vaadia moved to New York to continue his studies at Pratt Institute. To create his early works, Vaadia trawled New York streets for materials, grabbing slate, shingles, bluestone, and boulders from construction sites. He has said that the city’s energy and architecture has inspired his practice. Vaadia’s work can be found in public parks and in front of businesses worldwide, as well as in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Bass, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The artist lived and worked in New York City until his death in 2017.

Israeli-born artist Boaz Vaadia gained worldwide acclaim for his humanoid sculptures composed of layered stacks of stone. In 1975, after graduating from Tel Aviv’s Avni Institute of Art and Design, where he also taught from 1972 to 1974, Vaadia moved to New York to continue his studies at Pratt Institute. To create his early works, Vaadia trawled New York streets for materials, grabbing slate, shingles, bluestone, and boulders from construction sites. He has said that the city’s energy and architecture has inspired his practice. Vaadia’s work can be found in public parks and in front of businesses worldwide, as well as in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Bass, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The artist lived and worked in New York City until his death in 2017.

Peter Reginato combines biomorphic shapes and painterly precision in his bright welded-steel sculptures. With their organic, lyrical forms, his pieces resemble the three-dimensional works of Henri Matisse and Joan Miró. Reginato uses color to draw attention to the textured surfaces of his metallic structures, which are at once delicate and expressive. He creates holistic compositions from disparate, eye-catching parts.

Drawn to the immediacy, speed, and strength of working with metal, Matt Devine creates seemingly weightless and gravity-defying metal sculptures out of steel, aluminum, and bronze. Non-representational, the harmonious sculptures are characterized by clean lines in homage to mid-century Minimalism. Devine explains that the repetition of form, composition, and minimalistic patterns in his work “is about trying to remove as much as possible.” A self-taught artist who learned welding by constructing theater sets, he admits that each piece matches his intended design only about 95 percent. Although he strives for 100 percent, he enjoys the element of surprise that works its way in. Oftentimes, his idea for the next sculpture originates in something interesting he sees in the discarded scraps of metal left behind from the previous one.

Each Metis Atash sculpture is infused with the energy of the moment in which they were created. Metis Atash’s creations combine conceptual, minimalist, and pop art traditions. They unite contemporary and glamorous aesthetics with insightful, spiritual meanings. Metis sculpts with various materials, including fiberglass, iron, cement, and wood. Adorned in thousands of Swarovski crystals, Metis’s creations are a stunning visual experience.

Stanley Boxer devoted nearly five decades to the development of an expressive, abstract practice, encompassing drawing, sculpture, and printmaking. “In the manufacture of my art, I use anything and everything that gets the job done without any sentiment or sanctity as to medium,” he once said. While best known for his thickly brushed canvases that engage the material qualities of paint, he began his career as a figurative painter and draughtsman. Throughout the 1960s, Boxer was often associated with the Color Field painters and, for a period, used dense planes of color as the governing center of his work. He later moved beyond these concerns, however, towards an examination of paint itself.