Hollis Taggart

Hollis Taggart Downtown is pleased to present Afterlight, Rachel MacFarlane’s second solo exhibition with Hollis Taggart since joining its roster in 2022. The paintings in this exhibition speak to new forms of exploration in the artist’s practice: the richly jewel-toned landscapes for which MacFarlane is known retain their speculative aura while incorporating formal and conceptual possibilities of sunlight, particularly after her research trip to Spain in 2024. The exhibition will be on view at Hollis Taggart Downtown from January 9 to February 21, 2026, with an opening reception on Friday, January 9, from 6 to 8pm. Around the time she was embarking on this new body of work, MacFarlane began rekindling knowledge of wild plants through attending foraging workshops. As a result – although the landscapes of MacFarlane’s paintings are based only loosely on memories of specific places – most of the plants and flora in these new paintings are real and identifiable: hoary mountain mint that is common to Jamaica Bay, olive trees in Spain (where farmers told her that they cannot be grown naturally anymore due to increased sunlight from recent climate changes), poppies, dandelions, and morning glories, to name a few. The smaller works on paper capture events in the landscape or specific natural phenomena. Inspired by visionary painters like William Blake, Charles Burchfield, and Hilma af Klint, MacFarlane’s new works retool biblical, revelatory imagery of the unknowable and the sublime – as they relate to climate and the weather – into imaginary landscapes that look both pre-historic as well as post-human or survivalist. These new works suggest that such landscapes may lie in the not-too distant future, but at the same time look intensely speculative, as if straight out of a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin or Octavia Butler. MacFarlane’s landscapes might exist in the future in the aftermath of some cataclysmic event (as alluded to in the title of the show, Afterlight) but may not be accessible or viewable to any human. MacFarlane’s works expand on the long-standing genre of landscape painting to account for current ecological pressure on natural spaces. Her works speak to our complicated relationship to the natural world, in light of climate crises and the proliferation of digital, simulated landscapes that act as a form of surrogate landscapes. To begin her studio process, MacFarlane constructs paper maquettes within small, shallow boxes to initiate each painting. These maquettes function almost as scientific experiments, as the artist plays with different light colors and shadows. The paintings then evolve into speculative fiction, illustrating the changing landscape or envisioning its potential future – one taken over by flora, fabricated and rebuilt, and full of unknown phenomena. New ideas for works are often triggered by expeditions to different sites; MacFarlane chooses places purposefully based on their ecologies to get a pulse on various kinds of current environmental changes. Born in Scarborough, Canada, Rachel MacFarlane received her MFA from Rutgers University in 2016. She has had solo exhibitions at Norberg Hall Gallery, Calgary; MacLaren Art Centre, Barrie; Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Super Dutchess Gallery, New York; Mason Gross Art Gallery, Rutgers University; Anna Leonowens Gallery, NSCAD Halifax; and Howard Park Institute, Toronto. Her works have also been exhibited in Florence, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and elsewhere. MacFarlane was awarded a 2021 and 2019 Canada Council for the Arts Explore and Create Grant, a 2019 Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, 2019 Vermont Studio Center Residency, 2015 Ontario Arts Council Grant, and the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence at Fool's Paradise in Scarborough, Ontario, among numerous other awards. Her work is in public and private collections including Doris McCarthy Gallery at the University of Toronto, Jim and Susan Hill Collection, Equitable Bank, Stikeman Elliot, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, and The Donovan Collection at the University of Toronto. She has provided numerous artist talks including Concordia University, University of Toronto, OCAD University, NSCAD University and Sheridan College.

Hollis Taggart is pleased to present an exhibition of works by Renée Miller (1929-2025), a painter and sculptor known for her experimental approach to color and form. Miller was a key figure in Greenwich Village’s post-war avant-garde, exhibiting her works at both the Reuben Gallery and Martha Jackson Gallery. On view from February 26 through April 4, 2026, Renée Miller: The Devil's Snare will focus on the artist’s works from the 1950s and 60s, including a few examples of her “Extension Paintings.” Among Miller’s most innovative works, these paintings break free from the traditional frame of a canvas, with the artist’s signature bold colors and explosive brushwork bursting out of unconventionally-shaped canvases. The exhibition will also feature photographs, exhibition programs, and other archival materials that highlight Miller’s role in the post-war avant-garde scene in New York City. Renée Miller: The Devil's Snare is the artist’s first solo show in over 10 years. There will be an opening reception on Thursday, February 26, from 6-8PM. Miller was born in Brooklyn in 1929, and studied art at various institutions including the New York School of Painting & Sculpture, the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum Art School, among others. In the 1950s, she became an important member of the Reuben Gallery, an informal gallery space that played a formative role in the development of New York City’s avant-garde cultural scene. Among others, the gallery hosted Allan Kaprow’s first public “Happening,” Jim Dine’s first solo show, and exhibitions by Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms, and Renée Miller. The title of Hollis Taggart’s exhibition Renée Miller: The Devil's Snare, is taken from the artist’s statement for her first solo show at Reuben Gallery in 1960, in which she wrote ““Of all the devil’s snares to damn the souls of painters, the most deadly is concern with theories and results. It seems to me that the exultation of not caring about the outcome is an essential of the truly free spirit, being compelled only by an intense emotional response and the desire to explore.” Miller’s free spirit and desire to explore is evidenced throughout her works from the 1950s and 60s, on view here and including three works that were on view in her 1960 solo at Reuben Gallery. The artist’s bold brushwork and uninhibited use of color result in a vibrant dynamism that makes her paintings appear almost like a fireworks display. This is especially true of the “Extension Paintings,” in which Miller’s use of unusually-shaped canvases and impasto technique create three-dimensional, tactile surfaces that feel as though they might expand into the room. This sentiment is captured further in the artist statement from her Reuben Gallery solo, in which the artist writes, “This conviction, belief in oneself […] It is a fire-eater that cracks your being apart, breathing energy into the work – making the painting a wild battlefield existing on a multitude of levels, unlimited in its potential.” While the works at times seem exuberant, the bold colors belie a darkness revealed in their titles – such as After the Bomb is Over (1958) – or in details such as the word “HELP” emerging from the brushwork in one painting or the suggestion of a face in agony in another. Miller’s work received significant institutional attention in her lifetime, including being featured in the exhibition “New Forms, New Media I” at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1960 and “Eleven from the Reuben Gallery” at the Guggenheim Museum in 1965. In 2017, it was featured in “Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in New York City, 1952-1965”, a retrospective at the Grey Art Gallery at NYU. “One of our main goals as a gallery has always been to display and study the work of American artists who deserve more recognition. While Renée Miller was a key figure in New York’s post-war avant-garde, she has not received as much attention as many of her counterparts,” said Hollis Taggart. “We are eager to share her work with wider audiences and thereby hopefully inspire more scholarship about her innovative contributions to the history of American art.”

Hollis Taggart is delighted to present Bill Scott: Another Chance to Get It Right, which marks the artist’s eleventh solo show with the gallery since joining its roster in 2004. The exhibition spotlights a group of new paintings from his studio and will be on view on the first-floor annex of Hollis Taggart in Chelsea from February 26 to April 4, 2026, with an opening reception on Thursday, March 5 from 6 to 8 pm. “Painting for me is a non-verbal endeavor. My work evokes floral, garden, and water imagery but what I seek is a fictional feeling of unachievable calm, maybe even wonderment. Kindness. Harmony. Although my paintings are abstract, my hope is that they appear believable, symbolic of an of an actual place. Or an imagined space. That is what I yearn for, and this keeps me afloat. The only time I have absolutely no fear is when I paint,” Scott says. Rooted in his hallmark vivid color palette, Scott’s paintings are radiant, with a quality of surface achieved through the thinnest applications of paint and the use of various techniques honed over decades. A recurring motif in his oeuvre – and in this new show – is the circle, which Scott tentatively considers a “placeholder for flowers or another form… a circle can also simply be a way for the painting, or a part of it, to remain momentarily afloat.” Indeed, buoyancy is a sensibility that permeates his works; Scott has described his uplifting, high-key color palette also in terms of its ability to “act as a buoy to keep [him] afloat.” Like the historical artists that have influenced his artistic development, such as Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, and Henri Matisse, Scott creates paintings that transport us to states of wonderment and pleasure through the banal and everyday. Scott begins his works with no predetermined destination; he is fascinated by the questions and unknown possibilities of a painting’s life and believes that the process through which a painting comes into being is its content and narrative. Often working on paintings off and on for two or more years, Scott strives for “another chance to get them right,” as the title suggests. The four largest paintings in this exhibition, for example, went through numerous changes. As the artist explains, “I rarely abandon any in progress even if I’m stuck with a feeling of impossibility, as if [the paintings] are refusing to cooperate with me. I don’t rush but move forward with baby steps.” Bill Scott credits his time spent with artists Joan Mitchell and Jane Piper for profoundly influencing his practice. Piper was an important early mentor to the young Scott, who first wrote to her at age sixteen hoping to visit her studio. This mentorship was enhanced by a close friendship with Mitchell, whom Scott met in 1980. Throughout the 1980s, Scott frequently visited Mitchell at her home in Vétheuil, at times painting in her studio. He received from his formal education at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1974 to 1979. Scott’s works are held in the collections of the British Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Asheville Art Museum, Delaware Art Museum, and Munson Museum of Art, among others. In 2017 Rider University organized an exhibition including 22 of his works dating from 1997 to 2017. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, ARTnews, New York Times, and Philadelphia Inquirer.