Gwen O’Neil: “A Glimmer in the Shade” at Almine Rech New York: Art Exhibition Review

Walking into painter Gwen O’Neil’s recent exhibition at a New York City space for the art gallery Almine Rech was like walking into a field of flowers. When you’re there, there’s a growing sense that everything is as it should be.

O’Neil’s large and attention-grabbing paintings combined small, expressive, physically separated and highly individualized brushstrokes into sweeping fields of combined color, hearkening in their shape to both pictures of the cosmos and facets of the natural world closer to home, like an unfurling flower or a wave on the ocean: a wave you’re watching by itself and by yourself. She brings out from the grand a welling sense of aesthetic intimacy and real closeness.

It’s slightly startling — the isolated, direct, permeating power you’ve been left with — but it’s transfixing, and you’re not really thinking about that… other: the background, the context, expectation — or the lack of it. With these paintings, you’re just left mulling over what’s resting in front of you.

O’Neil’s artscapes posit an inward, driving connection, both among those real-world parallels from nature, invoked in this exhibition with a mostly overcast but still voracious color palette, and among whatever other, perhaps more personal points of reference that are possible. The exhibition felt like clouds of gentle, sensory memory, made manifest: the entire journey infused with a wave of belonging. The imaginable memory in place, its points of touch, sight, and interaction in tow, and you in place, watching it.

O’Neil’s smaller areas of painted color paralleled the construction of sensation, experience, story, and life’s substrate through the vivacious combination and recombination of small, real-world areas of color, tactility, perception, and sense. I think a lot about the flux of memory — something originating in strict perception but inevitably shifting — as reflected by more spatially abstract art, and O’Neil’s memory and sense-invoking vision is an immersion. She gives each fleeting moment a place and poignant integrity.

Each moment of color and space feels sincerely self-sustaining, existing and moving itself forward into the next moment plus the one after that by way of its sensory impact. And this all coalesces into the grand and regal, a feeling I pick up on a lot in fine arts with which I connect but that feels especially memorable here. The perceptibly cosmic and universal becomes inextricably also steeped in longing: the swinging churns of gnawing, searing, driving energy that are familiar in daily undertakings but here define the existential. The gentle is elevated and lauded.

In O’Neil’s paintings, you can look up into the galactic and see yourself. They’re paintings of harmony and transference, and of the long arm of a life’s elusive story as lurking at each of its many junctures. These clouds of recognition and the visible are shimmering, fragile, and fleeting, and they’re precious in how they float, luminously… an internal light that O’Neil’s art lets flow, freely, as a constructive force, a driving one, and an interactive one. The space she left between each brushstroke in much of this painting joined grounding — in at least the idea of something spatial and tangible — with the sublime.

The momentary, pointing towards perception but remaining just beyond it in suggesting reflected light originating from a panoply of surfaces and textures, flows directly into the architectural, arching, and consumingly definitive.

And the harmony across O’Neil’s exhibited work was just without end. I felt an internal, intertwining sense of belonging, of presence… of belonging so embedded and innate that it defined the entire journey of the whole thing in each example. It was living color defined by the fact we were looking at it, circulating back into itself without need of an external reference or a specificity. There’s no obvious, specific scene in any of these paintings, but they seem to nonetheless emanate definitively, so what you feel here as infinite and lasting — dramatic concepts — calmly presents itself. A strange and captivating certainty takes hold.

O’Neil’s exhibition, “A Glimmer in the Shade,” is already closed. She’s based in Los Angeles.

Featured image: Installation view of Gwen O’Neil ‘A Glimmer in the Shade,’ Almine Rech New York, Tribeca, 2025. © Gwen O’Neil. Courtesy of the Artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Dan Bradica.