Kevin McNamee-Tweed Untitled, 2025 glazed ceramic 5 x 6 3/4 in. (12.7 x 17.1 cm.)

Kevin McNamee-Tweed: The Weather

March 5-April 1, 2026

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

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.)

About the Artist

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.

Editorial

Gabriel Mills in the Studio, 2025

On the occasion of Alexander Berggruen’s exhibition Gabriel Mills: The Great Collapse (October 22-November 19, 2025), we’re pleased to share a studio visit with the artist. Video by James Kwon.

Press

A Para-Pastoral Movement Is Taking Root in Art. It’s Anything but Idyllic

ARTNET

Over the past few years, British artist Sholto Blissett (b. 1996) has garnered attention with his eerie and seemingly airtight natural vistas, where mountains and lakes are interrupted by imaginary monuments—fortress-like castles, topiaries, and monuments. The scenes are disquietingly serene and pristine, with no humans to be found.

Blissett, who has a degree in geography, said in a 2022 interview that during his studies he was “made aware of the falseness of the Romantic division between humans and nature–indeed, of the very construction of ‘Nature.’” His works prod these ingrained beliefs, asking viewers to consider the real-world consequences of the notion that nature is something humans can control and exploit.

Blissett’s next show will be in September at Alexander Berggruen in New York. Earlier this year, at London’s Hannah Barry Gallery, he removed almost all traces of human presence in the paintings, suggesting a prehuman history or perhaps a far-off future. For many artists exploring the para-pastoral, post-humanism is never far off.

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.

Purchase