Karen Kilimnik at Gladstone Gallery in New York City: Art Exhibition Review

Karen Kilimnik’s paintings that were showcased in a recent exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood are beautiful. And I think it’s important to be in that feeling straightforwardly and to let the paintings be as they are.

The images feature landscapes, but not ones you’d be likely to see physically manifested before you — not a place you’d actually find. In some, Kilimnik seems to blend multiple scenes on top of each other, also drawing in elements either inherently disparate or feeling out of place in their relative isolation. One painting, for instance, features a group of planes circling above a painted shore. It’s an imaginable sight, but she sets the scenery afloat without context, asking us to just be. You feel the lack — unmet expectation, a story untold and instead felt. The exhibited paintings felt like dream logic, made physically manifest.

Kilimnik drew out something from these environments where, even in a palpable, sensory context, it’s still beyond you. Even when you’re planted in the space each painting created, experiencing it from a first-person perspective, it all grew, and sometimes exponentially, leaving you a visitor and an archetypal stage performer: the guiding hand elsewhere. Here, each entire stretch of imagined space reaches out, encircling whatever unique guests that Kilimnik introduced and bringing that feeling — of belonging and togetherness, outside sense — to the viewer or visitor.

Each painting was a window, a snapshot, all depicting scenery that blends together in free-flowing feeling even if not in strict, spatial reckoning. Forest scenes, waterfront spots: each individually floating as though all a cloud and painted in hues vivid enough to be warm — a warmth experienced from shade, like sitting under an umbrella on one of these hot days and watching the sunlight slowly toast the space in front of you.

Many of these scenes are soaring, but at peace. In one standout work, Kilimnik’s “magic sea coast” from 2024, a body of water extends only part of the way you’d expect, aesthetically sputtering into open space on the canvas. But it all flows along just the same, and it’s truly holistic in how it and the exhibition as a whole do that. Kilimnik unfurls the background of familiar, perceptible spaces where openness looms… and it all blends, welcoming and even homely, even if perplexing. There’s a blanket of place and home in these scenes that sometimes lack clear, logistical meaning.

Kilimnik’s painting, at least what I saw here, generally wasn’t hyperrealistic, instead what I’d call emotional realism. Ironically, even though surprising elements already appear time and again, sometimes you might expect there to be more in a scene: some peripheral context cues, something placed there to cling to and give some foothold of explanation. But it wasn’t there.

I’m reminded of some of the enthralling art by J.M.W. Turner, who died in 1851 and whose paintings that I’ve seen sometimes blended clear nods to the physically experienced with what those bits of perception seemed to bring forth as they melded together. Perceptible abstraction, a realistic scene awash in color and form that resist precision.

And I think all of this resonated with real-world experiences of the positive and uplifting, like the blossoming flowers that Kilimnik crowded some of her exhibited artistic surfaces with. The showcased artworks were all just that: an uplifting, promising adventure, with promise visually embedded in the contours and surfaces of each artistically imagined place. Each moment in space seemed to carry more behind it, even if it wasn’t telling you exactly what that was.

Sometimes when you’re confronted with a scene of pleasantry, of connection, it’s — at least for a moment — all you see. Sometimes, it’s all you want to see. Seeing, and being seen, is enough. As much as Kilimnik’s scenes insisted on blending the perception of the place with the sensory experience of it, setting up a space of feeling behind sight, it was all flowing along peacefully.

Featured image:

Installation view, Karen Kilimnik, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2025.

© Karen Kilimnik.

Courtesy the artist, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Gladstone Gallery, and Sprüth Magers.

Photography by David Regen.