March 5-April 1, 2026
Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present our first solo show with Kevin McNamee-Tweed. This exhibition will open Thursday, March 5, 2026 with a 5-7 pm reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY).
Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Faucet (Waterfall), 2025-26
glazed ceramic
6 1/2 x 5 3/4 in. (16.5 x 14.6 cm.)
Through ceramics and works on paper, Kevin McNamee-Tweed explores the construction of meaning and the ways stories are formed, transmitted, and transformed. To assemble his playful, rigorous, and deeply considered visual language, he draws from a wide range of sources. Repeated motifs are mined from art history as well as the textures and symbols of everyday life. Material inquiry and sustained experimentation drive his mark- and image-making, most notably through clay and glaze. In The Weather, McNamee-Tweed centers themes of self-mythology, contemplative repose, and the experience of looking.
Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Untitled (Robot in Clouds), 2025
glazed ceramic
4 1/4 x 6 in. (10.8 x 15.2 cm.)
The artist’s pictorial ceramics—often described as “ceramic paintings”—merge the immediacy of two-dimensional imagery with the physical presence of sculpture. Rooted in exacting technique yet receptive to chance and mystery, they yield surfaces, textures, and optical effects unique to the alchemical ceramic process. Modest in scale, the works invite close viewing, fostering intimacy through handcrafted detail and narrative density, often infused with pathos, humor, and a persistent curiosity about the world.
Many of the ceramics in The Weather depict pictorial vignettes with emergent narratives that prompt questions about visual hierarchy, narrative structure, and perceptual depth. Demonstrating great range, McNamee-Tweed also presents works informed by pattern, ornamentation, and traditions of historical design and folk craft, including tilework, embroidery, and pottery. The artist’s expanding cast of recurring figures includes a searching, meditative robot, a walking triskelion, a flower bent by the wind, and inanimate objects that stir with a curious, animistic life. He plays with scale: horses can be held in the palm of a hand or walk along a tree branch.
Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Untitled (Accumulation Constellation), 2025-26
glazed ceramic
7 x 8 1/2 in. (17.8 x 21.6 cm.)
McNamee-Tweed’s new series of pictorial ceramics, titled Accumulation Constellation, depicts repositories of images set within uncontextualized, nonspatial fields. Juxtaposing disparate iconographies, these works hold objects such as a historic Bartmann jug, a Coca-Cola bottle, Tiffany lamps, and the artist’s recurring cast of characters. Across the series, he unsettles distinctions between subject and object, foreground and background, margin and center.
Accompanying the ceramics is a selection of works on paper spanning a wide range of media, styles, and surfaces. Pencil, ink, watercolor, milk paint, and black walnut ink are applied to handmade papers, cardboard, and found materials, including a leaf from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Tiger (Tiger), 2025
glazed ceramic
6 x 5 1/4 in. (15.2 x 13.3 cm.)
McNamee-Tweed’s ceramics and works on paper reflect careful attention to the weight, energy, and consistency of line. Depending on his tools and the pressure of his mark-making, the line’s presence shifts. At times, objects are defined by solid contours; at others, the line is fuzzy and broken, as if drawn with great energy or from a fading memory. In his ceramics, he achieves this through the meticulous refinement of unfired clay surfaces and incised marks, later heightened by an expansive lexicon of glaze applications—ranging from inlay and layered treatments to a range of deeply idiosyncratic techniques—that lend the works a resonant material and chromatic complexity.
Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Untitled (Robot Walking), 2025
pencil, pastel, ink, graphite on mulberry paper, framed
6 3/4 x 8 1/2 in. (17.1 x 21.6 cm.)
Through symbolism and material specificity, he foregrounds the conditions of the work’s making. One new motif emphasizes hands that reach for or hold his subjects, recalling the artist’s own. Another new body of work, the Figure with Circle series, began as ceramic tests reflecting slight variations in glazing and drawing techniques, resulting in an emergent, searching, contemplative mood. In one drawing, a robot in a landscape dissolves into a column of jumbled lines and color at the right edge, as if revealing the drawing’s underlying structure. In yet another work, the artist explores mise en abyme: a painter paints a scene of a painter painting a painter.
McNamee-Tweed’s persistent inquiry into refining and iterating reveals how vastly different moods and meanings can emerge from the same subject across shifting contexts.
Press release by Kirsten Cave, adapted from the artist’s statement.
Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Magnesium Wood Grain with Rainy Day Scene, 2025-26
glazed ceramic
6 1/4 x 4 1/4 in. (15.9 x 10.8 cm.)
This solo show follows McNamee-Tweed’s inclusion in Alexander Berggruen’s booth at the Dallas Art Fair 2025.
Kevin McNamee-Tweed (b. 1984, Stanford, CA) has held solo exhibitions at Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Chattanooga, TN; The Museum of Human Achievement, Austin, TX; and The Menil Collection, Houston, TX. He received an MA and MFA from University of Iowa and a BFA from New York University. His work is included in the public collections of Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; Institute of Contemporary Art, Chattanooga, TN; Museum Lucien de Gheus, Poperinge, Belgium; and The Bunker, West Palm Beach, FL. His work has also been shown at Museum Lucien de Gheus, Poperinge, Belgium; Tatjana Pieters, Ghent, Belgium; Dutton Gallery, New York, NY; Cob Gallery, London, UK; Steve Turner, Los Angeles, CA; L21 Gallery, Mallorca, Spain; Harper’s, New York, NY; among many others. He is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Ella Fountain Pratt Award, the Mildred Pelzer Grant, the Wilhelm and Jane Bodine Fellowship, The Iowa Arts Fellowship, and the Montello Foundation Fellowship. Reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artnet, Glasstire, Le Monde, and Hyperallergic, among others. McNamee-Tweed has published extensively, including monographs, collaborative projects, and artist’s books. The artist lives and works in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
In concurrent exhibitions by Kevin McNamee-Tweed and Tajh Rust, we find two artists who keep looking and discovering, despite dark circumstances.
I have come to think of Kevin McNamee-Tweed, a pictorial ceramicist, whose offbeat, tenderly absurd, improbable scenes evoke an enigmatic world, as part of the family of New York School artists that includes Joe Brainard, the British-born Trevor Winkfield, and more distantly, the British artists Glen Baxter (whose cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker) and Paul Hammond (who was also a translator and historian of Surrealism). All of them, who met at Leeds College of Art, celebrate what Hammond called the “everyday marvelous.” McNamee-Tweed fits right in with this aesthetic.
In two works, both titled “Rearview (2)” (2025–26), an empty rear-view mirror extends down from the top edge. The rest of the ceramic slabs are empty and sandy brown, as is the mirror. That emptiness suggests neither the future nor past is in sight. Being lost and baffled are recurring themes in McNamee-Tweed’s work.
— John Yau
