Yoab Vera: Spirit of Hope — Sueños Diurnos

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

Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present Yoab Vera: Spirit of Hope — Sueños Diurnos. Our second solo show with the artist, this exhibition will open Wednesday, January 21, 2026 with a 5-7 pm reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY).

The exhibition follows the artist’s first solo show at the gallery Yoab Vera: Reminiscence — Contigo Aprendí (July 10-August 22, 2024). Alexander Berggruen represents the artist.

Yoab Vera (b. Mexico City, 1985) received an MFA from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), where he also studied meditation practices at the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center in the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior. He graduated with a BA in Studio Art and Art History with a concentration in Latin American Art from Hunter College, New York, NY, and studied Architecture in Mexico City at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). His work has been exhibited at Casa Gilardi, Mexico City, MX; Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Casa MB, Milan, IT; El Castillete, Madrid, ES; Andrea Festa, Rome, IT; Make Room, Los Angeles, CA; Saenger Galería, Mexico City, MX; CFHILL, Stockholm; and GAVLAK Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; among others. Vera has held residencies at Duplex AIR, Lisbon, PT; El Castillete, Madrid, ES; Roman Road, Berlin, DE; and Fresco and Vernacular Architecture Painting School, Oaxaca City, MX. He was awarded the New York Community Trust Award in Painting and Poetry and has also received awards from the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. The artist lives and works between Mexico City and Istanbul.

Gabriel Mills
Jeiourmyne, 2025
oil on wood panel, triptych
78 x 132 in. (198.1 x 335.3 cm.)
panel 1: 78 x 36 in. (198.1 x 91.4 cm.)
panel 2: 78 x 36 in. (198.1 x 91.4 cm.)
panel 3: 78 x 60 in. (198.1 x 152.4 cm.)
Photo: Chris Gardner

The particulars of each painting’s forms emerge as a byproduct of the cascade of events that took place on its surface. For instance, closely inspecting Aejic reveals a small, worm-like texture that resembles the peaks and valleys of a mountain range. Clearly not the product of delineated mark making by Mills’s hand, this complex topography arose from overloading the paint mixture with an excess of linseed oil, which coils and warps into ridges and crevices as it attempts to oxidize over time. In Qephe, minute streams of paint trickle down as a result of low viscosity oil solutions that passed over still-drying, flat color. Further, large sacs of slow drying pigment have been carefully cut open and excavated, leaving the outer skin to be reintegrated and buried beneath fresh layers. Mills’s paintings are thus not solely defined by his own gestures, but by the behavioral dictates of oil and pigment as subject to his experimental methods. Every material action consequently leaves behind an entourage of scars and traces that compound to produce a surface so complex and tightly knit that it matches the variety, unpredictability, and material transformation of geological structures. 

In his largest works, the literal heaviness of abundant reserves of oil paint gripping onto a vertical panel is mediated by gently flowing gestures that, from a distance, carry a sense of weightlessness. Mills’s use of color similarly counters his paintings’ physicality, given that two colors of separate temperatures and intensities produce two different shifts in depth. The concentrated area of ultramarine blue in the center of Jeiourmyne, to name one example, visually recedes in space compared to the lighter, warmer surrounding colors that shift forward. The painting possesses a purely optical reality through the interaction of color alone; constructing not linear perspective but rather atmospheric perspective. This optical space extends into the painting, beyond its literal surface, just as the paint physically reaches out into the room to affirm the works’ material presence. Speaking about this quality, Mills stated: “The paintings are an embodiment of energy rather than a window into it.”

Mills employs alternative strategies to achieve the same sensation of compression and release in his smaller paintings. Dense, impasto brushwork disperses into delicately combed lines and smooth, blended color in the diptychs Aeoas and Qymne. Likewise, the visceral, encrusted paint on either end of the triptych Aune finds its inverse in the soft rendering of clouds in the center. 

Installation photos of Gabriel Mills: The Great Collapse (October 22-November 19, 2025) by Daniel Greer.

Despite alluding to the geological and the atmospheric, Mills does not strive for direct evocations of the natural world but more specifically to create an experience that parallels nature. His paintings, though varied in format and process, all possess an undeniable presence that holds energy and charge through the gradual accumulation—and occasional collapse—of material density. Mills’s core project is hence closely related to one of abstraction’s fundamental tenets, Symbolism, summarized by nineteenth-century French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé: “Paint not the thing, but the effect it produces.” (1)

(1) Stéphane Mallarmé, letter to Henri Cazalis, October 30, 1864, in Stéphane Mallarmé, Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 663.

Press release by British artist Matt Herriot.

Gabriel Mills in the studio, New Haven, CT, 2025. Photo: Jonathan Peterson

About the Artist

Gabriel Mills (b. 1992, New Rochelle, NY) received an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT and a BFA in Illustration and Art History from the University of Hartford, Hartford, CT. Recent solo exhibitions include Aunechei, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Udaya, François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA; TIDSOPTIMIST, Micki Meng, San Francisco, CA; and Butterfly March, Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; Museu Inimá de Paula, Minas Gerais, Brazil; K11 Musea, Hong Kong, CN; New York Historical, NY; Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles, CA; Pelham Art Center, Pelham, NY; Galerie ISA, Mumbai; and Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY. In 2021, he was an artist in residence at MASS MoCA. The artist’s work is held in public collections including: The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; The Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; New York Historical, NY; Museu Inima De Paula, Minas Gerais, Brazil; and X Museum of Contemporary Art, Beijing, CH. Mills lives and works in New Haven, CT.

This exhibition follows the artist’s solo show Gabriel Mills: Butterfly March (October 19-November 19, 2022), the gallery’s solo booth at The Armory Show (September 7-10, 2023), and his inclusion in the group shows Ted Gahl, Dustin Hodges, Gabriel Mills, Anna Ting Möller, Soumya Netrabile, Kaifan Wang (January 17-February 21, 2024) and Elana Bowsher, Vicente Matte, Gabriel Mills (June 2–July 14, 2021). Alexander Berggruen represents the artist.

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.