Seen & Unseen
EXHIBITION DATES: January 7 – 31, 2026
RECEPTION: Thursday, January 8, 2025, 5 – 8 pm
The Painting Center is pleased to present Seen and Unseen, a group exhibition uniting artists whose works navigate the shifting boundaries between clarity and obscurity, the material and the ephemeral, the revealed and the concealed. Across abstraction, landscape, figuration, and experimental surface, these artists explore how meaning emerges through both the seen and the unseen, revealing how perception is shaped as much by what is visible as by what remains obscured, suggested, or withheld.
Throughout these varied works, perception becomes fluid: forms dissolve into atmosphere, gestures gather into dense visual fields, and familiar objects or environments acquire new significance through distortion, layering, or absence. Seen and Unseen traces the interplay between discernibility and ambiguity, the physical and the psychological, surface and depth. Moving through interior and exterior terrains—forests, shorelines, roadsides, domestic spaces, and imagined fields of color and mark—the artists evoke memory through haze and dissolution or confront the immediacy of material through impulse, repetition, and touch. Some works hinge on the ghostliness of presence—an abandoned pair of glasses, a fragmented portrait, bodies sheltered beneath patterned cloth—while others vibrate with gesture, energy, or elemental force. Still others hover near silence: delicate lines drifting across pale grounds, faint notations resembling breath or murmured speech, articulating the unseen as resonance felt before it is fully perceived.
Expanding upon these themes, the works in Seen and Unseen challenge fixed perception, suggesting that seeing is not a singular act but a layered process. Marks are erased as quickly as they appear; images waver between formation and dissolution. Through these strategies, the works echo the nuances of memory, the mutability of landscapes, and the unstable nature of contemporary life. What emerges is a shared, though varied, pursuit: an inquiry into how the seen world is shaped by what lies beneath it—emotion, intuition, history, and the unconscious. Whether through the translucency of layered color, the suggestion of figures moving at the edge of sight, or the tactile density of paint that resists immediate legibility, each artist contributes to a collective meditation on presence and absence. Together, their works create a visual terrain where revelation is never absolute, and where the unseen continually informs what comes into view.
Seen and Unseen unfolds as a contemplative space, inviting viewers to slow their pace and linger with works that resist easy resolution. As certainty loosens, patterns surface, gestures recur, and spectral presences remain, urging us to consider what happens when vision falters—when knowing is shaped by feeling, and perception becomes a quiet gesture of care. Artists in the exhibition include: Robin Adsit, Susan Barrett, Bradley Butler, Richard Glick, Mary Hafeli, Kirstine Rainer Hansen, Elizabeth Johnson, Wendy Kawabata, Renee Khatami, Sharon Lacey, Jan Lhormer, Tai Lipan, Cara London, Laura Ann Perry, Liza Philips, Sue Rollins, Alicia Rothman, Virginia Sharkey, Kevin Sloan, Gene Underwood, and Laura Ahola Young.
