Closeness

This particular two-person exhibition features artists who could hardly know each other better. Spencer Lewis and Caitlin Lonegan are a couple in life, though not always in art. By which I mean, they’ve shown their work together, but not regularly. They met in grad school and once shared a studio but now work independently of one another. Still, it would seem obvious that their work would inevitably be “in dialogue,” given that both are painters who tend toward a visual language of gestural abstraction. But in speaking with Caitlin and Spencer—on separate studio visits—their dialogue about the paintings they make, is rarely direct and more often oblique or circuitous when it happens at all.

So, this exhibition is (among other things) an opportunity to bring the work of these two artists into explicit dialogue, face to face, or side by side, in a domestic context. This setting exacerbates the real-life dynamic of this artist couple, even if it’s not their apartment, surrounded by their personal effects, but more like an approximation of their lived intimacy.

From the exhibition text by Michael Ned Holte, Micki Meng, New York, 2023. Read the full press release