Goya Contemporary

“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”—but do we? What, in fact, are our truths as a nation? At 250 years, the American experiment remains profoundly unresolved. Unfinished Republic brings together Sonya Clark, Kyle Hackett, Joyce J Scott, Paul Rucker, Elizabeth Talford Scott, Louise Fishman, and Soledad Salame to examine a nation still struggling to define itself—morally, historically, environmentally, and politically. The project of America is incomplete not only because its founding promises remains unrealized, but because its most troubling histories have been repeatedly reshaped, minimized, or erased. This exhibition resists erasure. At a moment when efforts have escalated to suppress or sanitize narratives of enslavement, systemic violence, and dissent across cultural and educational institutions, these artists insist on confronting the full complexity of the nation and its narratives. Their work rejects the comfort of omission, addressing histories of bondage, lynching, sexual violence, misogyny, racism, hate and terror—not as distant events, but as forces that continue to shape American life. At the same time, it attends to beauty, to the plight—and profound contributions—of immigrants, and to those who have helped to build this complicated nation. In many ways, the United States is built on fracture—contradiction, invention, violence, ambition, forced labor, and myth. These conditions are not incidental; they are structural, continuing to shift beneath our feet. The artists in Unfinished Republic probe our entanglements: with land shaped by extraction and environmental neglect; with military service and the inheritance of war; with education amid a growing distrust of intellectual life and a long history of unequal access to knowledge; and with national symbols—flags, monuments, emblems—that may project unity while concealing deep division, or, as in the case of the Confederate flag, operate as enduring symbols of hate. At the same time, many of these artists also attend to the textures of daily life—tenuous, beautiful, and worth protecting. The exhibition invites a critical examination of cohesion, allegiance, freedom, and liberty, asking what it might take to move this unfinished experiment toward something more just. Echoing Langston Hughes’ assertion that America has yet to become itself, the exhibition foregrounds the gap between national ideals and lived realities. “Liberty Denied” resonates throughout—in bodies denied autonomy, in histories rewritten or silenced, and in landscapes marked by both visible and obscured violence. Yet Unfinished Republic is not only an indictment; it is an act of witness. Through material, gesture, and form, these artists create space for difficult truths to surface—unsettling, necessary, and at times unexpectedly beautiful. They ask what it means to reckon honestly with the past and whether a more just future can still be imagined.

Curated by Dries Van Noten with Geert Bruloot, the Presentation considers craftsmanship as a language of expression and a conduit for emotion. Works from fashion, jewellery, design, art, photography, glass, ceramics, and material experimentation move beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines, responding to one another to challenge assumptions, unsettle expectations, and reveal the profoundly human dimension of making. Within the rooms of Palazzo Pisani Moretta, the pieces engage with the building and with each other. As visitors move from the ground floor through the Piano Nobile levels, over two hundred objects resonate with ceilings, frescoes, and ornamental details, forming interactions that unfold with rhythm and intuition. Affinities emerge and contrasts ripple through space, each composition carrying the tension between mastery and discovery, between reflection and provocation. The Palazzo itself becomes an active participant, guiding perception and shaping the relationships between forms, materials, and histories. Beauty here is not a fixed ideal but a questioning presence. Making becomes a process of discovery, a dialogue that carries the traces of intention and imagination. Visitors move through moments of resonance and disruption, where perception awakens and possibilities unfold, and craft reveals itself as an ongoing process of inquiry and encounter. The Only True Protest Is Beauty features the works of: Adeline Halot, Alexander Kirkeby (Uppercut), Ann Carrington, Armand Louis for Wave Murano Glass, Arthur Vandergucht (Uppercut), atelier lachaert dhanis, Audrey Guimard, Ayham Hassan, Bruno Amadi, Bruno Barbon, Chris Fusaro (Uppercut), Christian Lacroix, Codognato, Comme des Garçons, Ettore Sottsass, Guillermo Santomà (Side Gallery), Hubert Duprat (Art : Concept), Isaac Monté (Spazio Nobile), Joris Laarman (Friedman Benda), Joseph Arzoumanov, Joyce J. Scott (Goya Contemporary Gallery), Julien d’Ys, Hyeokjin Jung (Side Gallery), Kaori Kurihara, Kate MccGwire, Katsuyo Aoki, Kiko Lopez (Objects With Narratives), Lionel Jadot (Objects With Narratives), Lilla Tabasso (Galleria Caterina Tognon), Lisa Immordino Vreeland, Misha Kahn (Friedman Benda), Monika Rościszewska, Moreno Schweikle (Uppercut), Nifemi Marcus-Bello (Side Gallery), Odile Gilbert, Pao Hui Kao (Spazio Nobile), Peter Buggenhout (Axel Vervoordt Gallery), Rebecca Manson (Josh Lilley), Richard Štipl (Steinhauser Gallery), Ritsue Mishima (Pierre Marie Giraud Gallery), Seongil Choi (Uppercut), Sophie Buhai (Galerie Anne Sophie Duval), Steven Shearer (David Zwirner and Galerie Eva Presenhuber), Takuro Kuwata (Pierre Marie Giraud Gallery), Václav Cigler (Galleria Caterina Tognon), Virginia Leonard (Side Gallery), Vladimir Slavov (Objects With Narratives), Wendy Andreu (Uppercut), Xavier Mañosa (Side Gallery). @2026 Fondazione Dries Van Noten

"Thinking Like an Oyster" marks Jo Smail’s eleventh solo exhibition with the gallery, celebrating more than twenty-five years of representation. The exhibition will feature forty-six new works presented in dynamic groupings that emphasize the rhythms, accumulations, poetics, and transformations central to the artist’s practice. A new publication on this body of work will be released in late April, with essays by Louis Fratino, Amy Raehse, and Kristen Hileman.

In honor of Black History Month—and in recognition of our broad, worldwide audiences who engage beyond Baltimore’s city limits—Goya Contemporary is pleased to introduce a month-long digital exhibition series, "History: In the Making." This series celebrates Black history as American history, foregrounding the achievements, contributions, and artistic practices of Black and Brown artists with whom we work. Throughout the month of February, we will present artworks accompanied by contextual and didactic materials, offering deeper insight into the artists’ practices and the histories they engage. The series will culminate in a digital publication, available following the close of the series. We invite you to spend time with these works, engage with them digitally in greater depth, and join us in celebrating the extraordinary achievements of each visual practitioner featured in the exhibition. This digital series also serves as a prelude to our forthcoming exhibition, "Unfinished Republic: America at 250," scheduled to open later this year. We look forward to continuing this dialogue with you.

Goya Contemporary Gallery is proud to announce Amalie Rothschild’s Modernist Eye, the first major solo exhibition of the artist’s work since the gallery was named exclusive representative of the Rothschild Estate in 2024. On view from November 23, 2025, through January 31, 2026, the exhibition opens with a public reception on Sunday, November 23, from 3:00 to 6:00 PM. This focused survey celebrates the prolific vision and enduring legacy of Amalie Rothschild (1916–2001), the pioneering Baltimore-based artist whose innovative work in painting, sculpture, and works on paper helped define postwar American modernism in the Mid-Atlantic and beyond. A selection of works curated from six decades, Amalie Rothschild’s Modernist Eye, highlights Rothschild’s ability to bridge abstraction and figuration, formal geometry and intuitive gesture—with a visual language as disciplined and rigorous as it is expressive.

Our 2025 Armory Show presentation brings together works by Alfred Jensen, Amalie Rothschild, Joyce J. Scott, and Madeleine Keesing, to explore how systems—mathematical, linguistic, cultural, or social—shape visual expression and meaning. Each artist engages structured methodologies as a foundation for intuitive, emotional, and conceptual exploration, revealing the profound ways systems inform contemporary and historical art practices. Alfred Jensen (1903–1981) fused numerology, ancient cosmologies, and abstraction to create vibrant compositions that bridge logic and intuition. His use of the Fibonacci sequence, astrology, and the I Ching reflects a belief in systems as both formal structure and metaphysical language. Amalie Rothschild (1916–2001) worked across painting and sculpture, integrating organic and mathematical forms. Her structurally innovative works emphasize balance, tension, and spatial clarity, challenging gendered expectations and asserting system-based abstraction as a site of discovery and tactile engagement. Joyce J. Scott (b. 1948) employs the peyote stitch—a meticulous off-loom bead weaving technique—to explore systems of race, identity, and power. A MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellow, her sculptures interrogate social structures through mathematics and craft, merging political urgency with visual complexity. Madeleine Keesing(b. 1941) creates intricate, meditative paintings built from accumulated marks and repetitive gestures. Her work balances control and chance, using structure as a gateway to spontaneity, inviting quiet contemplation and sensory depth. Together, these artists reveal how systems function not as constraints, but as catalysts for meaning—transforming color, form, and content into layered visual languages that resonate across time, identity, and experience.

Silverman’s recent work draws upon scroll-like photographs discovered while sorting through decades of materials within various archives. These images—group portraits of early 20th-century schoolchildren, summer campers, banquet attendees, and military recruits—were originally captured with large-format panoramic cameras. Recovered from obsolescence, they serve both as subject and object in Silverman’s conceptual, transformative investigations. “Given the relationship a photograph inevitably has with the past, my desire is to focus on the act of remembering. The contortions of the scrolls—the twisting, curling, and blurring during exposure—mirror the fragility of memory,” explains Silverman. “My manipulation of the scrolls attempts to evoke how the gap between the photograph and memory continues to widen as the time when the picture was taken recedes further into the past. This is also true for the near-obsolete technology used to make these panoramas.”

In Living With It, Davis examines how objects—particularly those found in the landscape—act as intimate companions in the face of time’s vast and disorienting passage. Drawing visual and conceptual parallels between domestic space, time, and geological matter, the exhibition poses a central question: how do we make sense of things too large to grasp? And by extension, how can something as immense as a landscape, a nation, or even time itself be encountered meaningfully from within the four walls of a single room? Referencing 19th- and 20th-century American landscape photography, Davis turns that tradition on its head. “Where early photographers compressed the sublime expanse of the American West onto 8x10-inch sheets of film—rendering the land legible, safe, and ownable—these new photographs reverse that gesture” says Davis. “In them, rocks from disparate locations—a stone found in Baltimore, a fragment of iron ore purchased online from the West—are placed atop scans of large-format film. Rather than reducing the vast to the knowable, these images expand the familiar, rendering the small into something monumental.” The photographs act as counter-landscapes—“portals that challenge assumptions of ownership, scale, and the idea that human perception is the proper measure of understanding the world.”

Goya Contemporary Gallery is pleased to present Soledad Salamé: Camouflage, a traveling exhibition on view at Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore, MD from April 12 - July 2, 2025, with a Reception on April 17, 5-7pm, and on view at Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, TX from Oct 17, 2025- March 15, 2026. As environmental degradation becomes an increasingly pervasive and subtle part of our daily lives, its impact continues to be overshadowed by the promises of “green” consumerism. While major corporations tout their eco-friendly initiatives, the exploitation of natural resources persists unchecked. Global summits and regulations continue to struggle for meaningful change, and the spectacle of eco-activists disrupting art institutions seems more like a symbolic gesture than an effective solution. It is within this complex and urgent context that Chilean American artist Soledad Salamé positions her latest work—a profound, poetic intervention at the intersection of art, research, and environmental activism. Salamé’s work highlights the quiet but powerful resilience of nature in the face of human influence. She collaborates with scientists, ecologists, and environmentalists to create works that are not only visual reflections, but also repositories of labor, resistance, and hope. Through this collaboration, she captures the often invisible or overlooked effects of environmental violence, while also exploring moments of healing and repair. A core focus of Salamé’s practice has been her repeated engagement with the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, a region severely impacted by pollution and the mass disposal of textile waste—particularly fast fashion. Millions of pounds of discarded clothing are buried in the desert’s arid landscape, where they have become an unnerving, permanent feature of the terrain. This ecological wound, a direct result of unsustainable consumerism, serves as the backdrop for Salamé’s latest work.