Danny Fox: Fata Morgana

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST:
https://bit.ly/BrittneyLeeanneWilliams-Huddle-Checklist

Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present our first solo show with Emma Fineman. This exhibition will open Tuesday, May 19, 2026 with a 6-8 pm reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY).

For her solo show Devotion, Emma Fineman presents a new body of psychological paintings where queerness is not exiled from divinity but placed at its very center. Grounded in materiality, Fineman’s symbolic, figurative works incorporate gestural brushstrokes, original prose texts, and thick surface textures.

Presented at Alexander Berggruen in New York, the exhibition comes just months after the Trump administration removed the Pride flag from Stonewall National Monument. Fineman centers motifs of hope and love, offering a celebration of queer liberation at a time when its expression is increasingly challenged. She posits that, despite enduring religious ostracism, few things are more holy than the purity of love born out of queerness, both towards self and others.

Though raised within Jewish mysticism, Fineman draws on a range of spiritual traditions. Developed in response to her recent work The Genesis Project, this exhibition explores universal themes drawn from varying biblical stories as an entry point to intuition, acceptance, self-assurance, and exploration. Often, the figures’ journeys lead to abundance, rendered through light and lush, fruitful scenes of the natural world. In her painting Low Hanging Fruit, Fineman repositions Eve as though she has stirred from a dream; her fixed focus on the apple becomes a conversation about desire as an usher to remembering knowledge lost in the waking. We see Eve rising from a celestial river, the pattern of which recurs throughout the exhibition, including in the sky in Lambda (RYB). Repeated forms such as these thread through the paintings, offering windows into alternative perspectives within a shared world.

Fineman develops a personal iconography by reconfiguring signs and symbols that recur across faiths and histories. The lambda—a Greek character associated with unity and queer liberation—is repositioned as a central motif throughout the exhibition. Depicted in the eponymous painting Lambda (RYB), Fineman situates the symbol within yonic forms referencing the devotional imagery of Madonnas. Turned on its side in Undercurrent the motif transforms into an all-seeing eye and appears again as a gathering of figural forms clustered behind a window in Ark.

Born and raised in the Bay Area, Fineman’s painterly structures recall the Bay Area Figurative Movement, particularly Richard Diebenkorn. Fineman balances the energetic vibrancy of vermilion against swathes of inky and mysterious wonder found in the depths of Phthalo green. She oscillates between ebullient and shadowed palettes, reflecting a journey toward embracing the full spectrum of the self. Through expressive applications of oil, encaustic, hessian, newsprint, and charcoal, Fineman conjures figures that are at once ghostly and monolithic.

Through gestures toward revisionist history and autobiography, Fineman opens a psychological space that engenders curiosity. Emerging from the space between representation and abstraction, Fineman’s intimate narratives encourage viewers to follow intuition into the reaches of their own most personal truths.

Press release by Kirsten Cave, adapted from the artist’s statement.

Editorial

Emma Fineman on “Devotion,” Her Solo Exhibition at Alexander Berggruen, NY

On the occasion of Alexander Berggruen’s current exhibition Emma Fineman: Devotion (May 19-June 24, 2026), we’re pleased to share a video of the artist speaking about her work in her studio. Video by Dina Paola Rodriguez

Press

Emma and Chloe Fineman for The Besties Issue

POLYESTER ZINE

Finally in the same city at the same time, the pair sit down by the lake in Central Park – and there’s a lot to talk about: it’s the weekend of SNL’s season finale, while Emma’s art exhibition is showing in the city’s Alexander Berggruen.

Emma Fineman: I feel like we’re really lucky in that we were always surrounded by art growing up, so it was never a question about being creative. And we grew up always sharing with each other everything that was inspiring, everything that we loved, constantly – movies, fashion, dress up.

Chloe Fineman: I think that it doesn’t matter what you do, whether it’s music, film or painting, there is this creative process where you’re alone, figuring out how to make something and we share that nugget before something’s made and the panic and doubt and curiosity can really be sounding boards. We’re both making art, just in different fonts.

Emma Fineman: Alone in our rooms. I think that that’s honestly also where besties comes in. Because you need someone in your corner. Being a creative is actually really challenging and there’s so much self-doubt and having that person that you love and trust telling you that you can keep going is so huge. And you’ve been that for me forever.

Reveling in Enigma: Emma Fineman’s Paintings Reveal the Inner-Self as a Double

ARTFORUM

Now on view at Alexander Berggruen, Emma Fineman’s paintings appear, paradoxically, both solid and ethereal, as though made from a fusion of rock and vapor. The artist creates heft through architectonic composition and relief-like facture, often giving structure by dividing the image into discrete zones of color.

I see her work as not questing for knowledge but reveling in enigma, enacting what queer theorists such as Judith Butler and Michael Snediker have identified as more integrated ways of experiencing personhood, not divided between a true interior and a false surface. This is most evident in Lambda, where the central figure personifies the mutability of meaning that the painting’s form enacts. We see a beatific jade-colored face beneath what appears to be a partially lifted red mask. But while the woman’s left leg and nipple bear the same green hue, the limb does not seem to emerge from underneath the ruddy torso so much as extend from where the crimson expires at the hip. If anything, the nipple’s higher value and greater saturation drive it optically past the surrounding reds behind which we expect it to be lurking. Whereas we ordinarily think of masks as concealing faces, this happily doubled figure suggests two selves intertwining in a body divided, neither entity more real than the other. In this weighty but floating world, we need not mine for inner truth but allow ourselves to linger on the enigmatic surface.

Household Objects of the ’90s, Recreated in Clay

THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

Artist Stephanie Shih conjures a poignant domestic drama by recreating the symbols of temptation, vice, convenience and self-improvement that defined American life in the 1990s.

In Domestic Bliss, a tenderly realized portrait of American life in the 1990s at Alexander Berggruen in New York, the artist Stephanie Shih draws us into a fraught family narrative.

The artist builds the pieces by hand, using a fine brush to decorate their surfaces. There are subtle signs that each object is handmade, evoking the crafted pop sensibility of Corita Kent or Liza Lou — a slightly dappled finish here, a hint of hand lettering there. The net result is the uncanny feeling that the whole room has been seen, recorded, lost, then lovingly recreated, each element conjured by a human being with a memory that aches.

Publications

Cara Nahaul: Tender Island

Cara Nahaul: Tender Island was published on the occasion of the gallery’s eponymous exhibition, which will run from April 10-May 8, 2024. This catalogue features a foreword by Kirsten Cave and an interview between Cara Nahaul and writer, editor, and curator Anneka French, which took place in February 2024.