Locks Gallery

"Warren Rohrer: Return to Land" revisits the artist’s relationship to his rural Pennsylvania upbringing and his evolution as a painter from landscapes to abstraction.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of sculptures by Norwegian textile artist Hanne Friis (b. 1972) and renowned sculptor Lynda Benglis (b. 1941). "Hanne Friis / Lynda Benglis" presents a dialogue between two generations of artists driven by material exploration who share a desire to merge process and form. This is Friis’ first exhibition in the U.S. and is accompanied by a 112-page catalog with an essay by art historian and critic Amanda Gluibizzi.

Locks Gallery presents 'House of Nevelson,' an exhibition of sculptures and collages by renowned artist Louise Nevelson (1899–1988). The exhibition echos Nevelson’s processes of assemblage as an endless search for home. “My whole life is one big collage," she famously said; "the way I think is collage.”

Locks Gallery is pleased to share "Selected Paintings, 2019 – 2023" by Dona Nelson (b. 1947). Recognized as one of the most innovative painters since the 1970s, this marks Nelson's first exhibition with the gallery. Featuring recent single and double-sided paintings, Nelson’s powerful abstract creations are a testament to their unwavering commitment to material invention and artistic exploration of color and texture. The resulting compositions challenge the traditional boundaries of painting, inviting contemplation and discovery.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Morning Noon Night, a solo exhibition of new paintings by the Philadelphia-based artist Sarah McEneaney. Since the 1970s, McEneaney has composed diaristic paintings depicting many areas of life with an unmatched intimacy and reverent vulnerability.

Locks Gallery presents 'Space Dreams' by Edna Andrade (1917–2008), including a selection of prints and drawings from the 1950s through 1990s. Intimate studies connect color and pattern to a modernist love for the grid in Andrade's work.

Locks Gallery is pleased to announce Night and Day, an exhibition of small-scale shaped paintings by David Row spanning from 2017 to the present. Row’s quartz-like paintings transform the seemingly solid, two-dimensional surface of each wood panel into an expansive, multi-perspectival space. Using hard-angle edges and intersecting lines, these image-forms destabilize the illusion of a unified shape and combine opposing tendencies, such as rectilinear and curvilinear or positive and negative spaces.

Locks Gallery is pleased to announce Small, a group exhibition of works in an array of media including drawings, paintings, ceramics, precious metals, to Surrealist assemblages. This group show focuses on scale and how artists play with our perception of space.

Critically acclaimed as one of the most influential contemporary artists in Korea, Lee has worked for over five decades using a range of mediums, including early performances and video to a focus on painting beginning in the mid-1980s. Locks Gallery is present Wind / Flow featuring a selection of paintings and ceramics from the 1990s to the present. This is the artist’s first solo show in the U.S. in over a decade, coinciding with his participation in the Guggenheim exhibition Only the Young: Experimental Art in Kora, 1960s–1970s.

Line Moving Through Light is Joanna Pousette-Dart's second solo exhibition with the gallery and will feature a selection of works on paper. Inspired by her perceptions of nature – its vastness, prismatic light and the everchanging dialogue between earth and sky – Pousette-Dart’s works feature distinct color combinations that transform light into line, creating spatial continuums that extend beyond the image. Her free-handed drawings are spontaneous, intuitive explorations which she describes as “gestural, kinesthetic imaginings,” floating within the space of each rectangular paper.

In memory of the artist, Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of large-scale works by Jennifer Bartlett from her Swimmers series (1978–1980), alongside her monumental piece, Atlantic Ocean (1984), made up of two hundred and twenty-four steel plates. Jennifer Bartlett: Swimmers will be accompanied by catalogue featuring an essay by Jonathan Fineberg.

Often considered a 'historical' painter, Jane Irish layers and combines art historical motifs from a variety of periods into intricate compositions – such as rococo-inspired interiors and 'cosmos' ceiling paintings – drawing attention to how violence resurfaces through tradition and aesthetics. This show features six new paintings alongside earlier works which connect historical atrocities to contemporary sociopolitical motifs.

"Out of the Fragments" brings together collages by Post-War artists Louise Nevelson, Robert Motherwell and Edna Andrade. This collection speaks to the medium’s unique possibilities for expression and immediacy. These works also demonstrate how collage allowed them to expand the parameters of their art and explore a wider range of material and formal elements.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present "Snow and Waterfall", an exhibition of works from Pat Steir’s acclaimed 'Waterfall' series and related works. This marks the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery. Spanning over four decades of her career, this exhibition will occupy the first and second floors of the gallery.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present 'Seeing in the Dark', an exhibition of new paintings by British artist Kate Bright. The gallery has represented the artist since 2005, and this will be Bright’s sixth solo show at the gallery. Bright continues her interest in vibrant depictions of flora, while treading into new territory. Throughout her career, Bright has remained attuned to nature. Whereas much of her previous work was hyper-stylized and featured compositions nearing abstraction, her current body of work centers around “cultivated plants growing rogue” as “escapees from the domesticated environment.”

Locks Gallery is pleased to present 'Understories', an exhibition of new and recent films, sculpture, and holograms by Philadelphia-based artists Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib. Known for their fantastical moving images and alternate realities, this will be the artists’ fourth solo show at the gallery. This show focuses on the theme of nature - growth, nurture, cultivation, cycles. The show’s title ‘understory’ refers quite literally to the underlying layer of vegetation, specifically the trees and plants between the forest canopy and the ground cover.

Locks Gallery is pleased to announce Louise Fishman: Soliloquy, which marks the late artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The show features paintings from the past twenty years, which highlight several important canvases and drawings made surrounding her third, and final, residency in Venice, Italy from 2016 to 2017.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Beverly Semmes: Marigold, the artist’s inaugural show with the gallery. Semmes, a New York based artist, is known internationally for her large-scale installations featuring oversized, handmade sculptural dresses mounted directly on the wall. Her work spans a wide variety of media including clay, fabric, glass, photography, drawing. This exhibition will highlight work from the past two decades, showcasing her textile work - including a new monumental fabric installation commissioned by Alexander McQueen - in addition to her acclaimed ‘Red Pot’ ceramic sculptures and new mixed media works on canvas.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of important paintings and works on paper by the celebrated Philadelphia artist Edna Andrade. The exhibition will span both floors of the gallery and be on view from September 15th to October 15th. Focusing on works from 1962 to 1990 the show will highlight optical paintings and geometric abstraction.

Locks Gallery is delighted to present the eighth one-person exhibition by Lynda Benglis that detail the artist’s celebrated sculptures, on view from May 19 through July 22, 2022. Her unabashed approach to painting, sculpture, and installation is defined by a hybridity of both two-and-three-dimensional space and a wide array of material exploration and experimentation. The artist’s body, and her physical gestures, are always present in the playfulness of the works and the tactile qualities of their making.

Locks Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of Warren Rohrer’s paintings and drawings from the 1990s. Warren Rohrer (1927–1995) was born in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and became one of Philadelphia’s leading abstract painters in the late 20th century.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Synecdoche II, an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Nancy Graves (1939–1995). This will be the artist’s sixth one-person exhibition with the gallery since 1991 and will feature abstract paintings on canvas and pastels on paper from the mid to late 1970s, some of which have never before been exhibited.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Odyssey, a two-person show of recent work by artists Rob Wynne and Barbara Takenaga. Both artists perform a dance between chance and precision through their chosen materials, poured glass and acrylic paint, respectively. Their works radiate a primordial energy, appearing at times illuminated and evoking galactic or aquatic phenomena such as bioluminescence, cosmic bursts and star formations.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present "Here and There," an exhibition of new paintings by John Moore (b. 1941). This is the artist’s sixth solo show with the gallery since the mid-1990s and will feature works made during the past year. Shaped by a deep sense of place, "Here and There" draws inspiration from a range of real and imagined locations from the coast of California to the coast of Maine.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present "Jennifer Bartlett: Interlude, a solo exhibition of works on paper. Interlude covers a period of ten years from the 1990s to the late aughts, and extensive research revealed nearly four hundred works from this period. Never shown together until now, this group of work was amassed from a number of private collections.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present "Jennifer Bartlett: Recitative", a solo exhibition featuring the artist’s monumental titular painting. Composed of 372 steel plates and measuring over 158 feet across, Bartlett’s colossal polyptych navigates the reductionistic practices of Minimalism and rule-based systems of Conceptualism.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Home and Away, a solo exhibition by renowned Philadelphia artist Sarah McEneaney. This marks the fourth solo exhibition of McEneaney at the gallery and is accompanied by a catalogue in conversation with curator and scholar Janine Mileaf. Since the 1970s, McEneaney has fervently captured the splendor and catenation of her environments, including her home, studio, pets, and neighborhood. Home and Away expands on this autobiographical narrative by including scenes of travel and artist residencies to give a fuller scope of her practice and how it shapes her body of work. The exhibition includes earlier examples of egg tempera paintings alongside recent large-scale works in acrylic and collage, chronicling a shift in technique and perspective.

Celebrating the 100 year anniversary of his birth, Locks Gallery is pleased to announce "Thomas Chimes: Centennial." Chimes' trajectory as an artist can be seen through distinct periods embodying shifts in material and approach, with each body of work demonstrating meticulous craftsmanship and deep intellectual engagement with his sometimes hidden subject matter. "Thomas Chimes: Centennial" features works made from the last thirty years of his life in which recognizable imagery and color gradually dissipates from his canvases and he invents a new mode of working on a small scale.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Jun Kaneko, the artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery, featuring significant freestanding ceramic forms and wall-hung pieces with abstract designs and markings. Originally trained as a painter in Japan and captured by the California Clay Movement of the early 1960s, Kaneko has for decades explored the interpenetration of form and space in his sculptures.

Through twelve distinct works, spanning from the 1940s through the 1970s, "Willem de Kooning" highlights the late artist’s strength in seamlessly traversing, and blending, abstraction and figuration.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by David Row. This is the artist’s third solo show with the gallery. A catalog with an essay by Carter Ratcliff accompanies the exhibition.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings and ceramics by Philadelphia-based artist Jane Irish (b. 1955).

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Ellen Harvey’s monumental Metal Painting along with recent related bodies of work that invert and re-contextualize the traditionally hierarchical relationship between the fine and decorative arts, between the celebrated artist and the artisan laboring in obscurity.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Louise Belcourt (b. 1961). This will be the artist’s second solo show with the gallery.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present the 10th solo exhibition of Philadelphia artist Neysa Grassi (b.1951) which will include a selection of recent works. Known for her meticulous and deeply rich multi-layered paintings, the examination and application of transition, memory and chromatic shifts is central to her practice. Often working on a singular painting for more than a year, Grassi’s endless dedication of applying countless layers of paint and sustained concentration is experienced in each work.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Joanna Pousette-Dart (American, b. 1947). This will be the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery following her inclusion in the 2017 group exhibition Shape Paintings.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Elizabeth Osborne: Liquid Landscapes, an online exhibition spanning forty years of the artist's atmospheric exploration of both land and sea. Utilizing a technique of controlled pours of thinned acrylic and oil paint on unprimed canvas to create a staining technique became a vital component in the artist's practice during the 1970s. Aware of a similar technique pioneered by painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Osborne was initially interested in capturing the light and transparency of her watercolors and pushing its translation onto canvas. Osborne has also frequently painted outdoors with watercolor—some of her beloved locations are Manchester by the Sea, coastal Maine, and the southwest.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present the installation of Jennifer Bartlett's major work, Sea Wall (1985). Exhibited in her fifteen-year traveling retrospective in 1985, Bartlett’s piece encompasses three canvases and over a dozen sculptural elements - from houses to boats to stepping stones - stretching over thirty-five feet in length. Bodies of water as elements of the landscape have been a long-recurring subject for the artist, as the surprising array of assorted sculptural objects stand in for the human form while luscious, pictorially-rich canvases span thirty feet alongside the three-dimensional objects found in Sea Wall.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Speechless, featuring recent work by New York-based artist Rob Wynne. For his fifth solo show at the gallery, Wynne will exhibit recent works that explore the elusive nature of language through his use of eccentric materials.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Thomas Chimes: The One Who Whispers, which investigates Chimes’ connection to literature, science, and ephemerality through the artist’s white paintings, spanning from 1980-2009.

Locks Gallery is pleased to announce A Silent Call, an exhibition of Warren Rohrer’s paintings from the 1980s. Emerging from the experimental Philadelphia art scene in the early 1970s, Warren Rohrer (1927-1995) became known for his luminous, meditative paintings that concentrate intensely on subtle shifts of color and the steady repetition of the stroke. This exhibition highlights Rohrer’s work from the 1980s, a period between his subdued Pond series and the bolder Field Language series, and includes paintings that have never before been exhibited at the gallery. Rohrer’s study of the perception of color reflected his interest in expanding painterly abstraction while at the same time referencing the Pennsylvanian landscapes in Lancaster County from which he drew inspiration. Featured work by Rohrer of "Nightshade" 1987-88, oil on linen, 48 1/4 x 48 1/4 inches.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Philadelphia artist Elizabeth Osborne. The gallery has worked with the artist for the past four decades, and this exhibition represents a continuation of Osborne’s landscape paintings that highlight her vivid and immersive compositions, many of which stem from the locations of her travels. From the hills and shores of Maine and Nova Scotia to the architectural details of Mexico, the artist navigates the transitions between abstraction and realism.

Locks Gallery is pleased to announce Taking Shape, an overview of Edna Andrade’s geometric work from the 1960s through the 1980s that forefronts her studies, drawings, and sketches, alongside selected larger-scale paintings. The presentation highlights the methodical working practice of an artist who was perpetually re-working and investigating new forms. Andrade was deeply invested in shape, vision, and color, and her well-known Op Art paintings were the products of hundreds of hours of preparation. A selection of never-before-seen archival pieces reveal her lifelong, thoroughgoing investigation of the optics of seeing through process and study.

Locks Gallery is pleased to announce My City, Louise Fishman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition features recent paintings and marks a return home for Fishman, who was born in Philadelphia, where she spent her early life and attended Tyler School of Art at Temple University, before settling in New York. Louise Fishman’s career to date spans over five decades, throughout which she has produced tough and uncompromising work that is at once architectonic and poetic. Her paintings are layered upon an improvised structural grid assembled out of strokes, skeins, and slashes of oil paint, applied with large, serrated trowels and scrapers, along with more traditional paint brushes—and sometimes, her hands. Fishman’s work celebrates the process of painting and its materiality in works where containment and release are palpably visible. She adds, scrapes away, and re-applies paint, sometimes working and reworking canvases over a long period of time.

Kate Bright (London, UK) studies the seductive refractions of light in pools, fountains, and ponds. Her signature style utilizes glitter, resin, glass and polystyrene on the surfaces of the paintings. Rob Wynne (New York, NY) choreographs large hand-poured abstractions of mirrored glass on the walls that glimmer while they call natural formations and swarms of organic form to mind. Using bold colors, radiant light, and dynamic perspectives, Louise Belcourt (Brooklyn, NY and Quebec) paints images of tectonic landforms—stacked, occluded, and cascading into foreground and background—medled melded with natural forms. Virgil Marti’s (Philadelphia) The Golden Bough (2013) is cast from a split tree trunk and features a gilded grapevine, immortalizing and petrifying their natural features. Yeesookyung (Seoul, Korea) creates organic, “grafted” structures from discarded pieces of Joseon-style ceramics deemed imperfect by potters that evolve into contemporary, life-imbued, conceptual forms.

Pat Steir is an acclaimed figure in contemporary art history, known for her site-specific wall drawings and signature style of abstract painting. In the studio, she pours, splashes, and drips paint onto vertically hung canvases. Steir's practice embraces chance as a conceptual backbone for her work; the paintings form themselves through gravity and transform their own palette through the chemistry of the paint layers. The artist was raised outside of Philadelphia and its cultural institutions had a deep influence on her early artistic trajectory. Having exhibited Pat Steir's work for over twenty years, Locks Gallery is proud to present this exhibition of new paintings.

Throughout her career Lynda Benglis has often taken a serial approach to her work, replicating a process to push her materials to the extremes of their formal potential. Her comfort in unexplored territory has led to an abandonment of traditional media and aesthetics, with the work often occupying an uncanny space between the grotesque and beautiful, between material and flesh. Celebrated for her ability to bring painterly fluidity to sculptural forms, this exhibition showcases three of Benglis’ sculptural styles: ceramic, paper and polyurethane.

For decades, Sarah McEneaney has captured the simplicity of her surroundings—her home, her studio, her garden, her pets, and her neighborhood—with reverent attention. The care with which she renders each minute detail forms the architectural structure of her environment and the scaffolding of her personality, her passions, and the inhabitants of her life. In these paintings, the viewer becomes omnipotent, tracing the underpinnings of McEneaney’s life in vibrant, nonlinear narratives: featuring multiples of the artist and her pets as they make their way through time and space.

In her latest series of paintings, Sarah McCoubrey captures the eerie magnificence of a generation that stands between two times—rooted in the last breaths of manual traditions carried from the nineteenth century, but charging toward the machine acceleration of the modern era. McCoubrey articulates the valor and brutality of World War I through the lace-maker’s painstaking language of a traditionally feminine craft. After beginning a sabbatical abroad in Belgium in 2014, at the cusp of the centennial of World War I, McCoubrey became enraptured by the the delicate beauty of Belgian lacework and the conflict’s effect on an artistry devastated by the wartime rationing of linen. McCoubrey’s fine calligraphic strokes revive the ancestral folk medium to weave a narrative which invokes feminine creativity—forging elegant lace lines in gouache to depict stoic wooden ships, hooded gas masks adorning the solemn figures of soldiers, and intricate domestic motifs grounded on repurposed butter papers: the relics of rationing. Centennial pays reverence to a period, perhaps not so far gone, when time might have moved differently between letters from the front, the delicate handicraft of items made in the home, and the slow glide of ships across the sea.

Artists David Hartt and Tim Portlock transcribe their worlds, creating complex narratives that address global exchange, racial tension, and the physical and sociological effects of failed modernist projects. Man-made deterioration is juxtaposed with representations of sublime and persistent nature—creating images of startling elegance despite their crumbling subjects. Atmosphere and ideology frame fraught narratives of white flight, urban planning, and socioeconomic stratification—issues which have been endemic to social design since the nineteenth century, but which were exacerbated throughout the economic booms and busts of the mid-to-late-twentieth century. Picturing the banal landscape of industrial decline, both Hartt and Portlock reassert the distance from which most individuals will view these problems. In scenes at once devoid of human life and irreparably changed by human hands, these artists call attention to the cyclical entropy of humanity on a global scale while also rendering beauty into these abandoned environments. Fallow Fate provides a valence through which we might view stasis as a point of recovery.

During the winter of 1979–80, Jennifer Bartlett traded homes with British novelist Piers Paul Read, exchanging her SoHo loft for a mediocre villa in Nice far from the famed seafront which had inspired the paintings of Matisse, Bonnard, Renoir, and Picasso. The series borne of this disappointing tourism, In the Garden, reinvigorated her practice and captured the myriad of natural forces and emotional states that she experienced during her stay. The fluency with which Bartlett transcribed the emotive potential of an otherwise desolate scene and the deftness of her mark-making prompted a 1983 review in Time Magazine where Robert Hughes proclaimed Bartlett to be a “connoisseur of unease,” because she simultaneously captured the banality of her surroundings while developing a forensic antidote to the ennui of her generation. Locks Gallery is pleased to present a reconstitution of In the Garden that highlights the serialized nature of this body of work. In the Garden was produced first from life as roughly 200 hundred works on paper; later reinterpreted from photographs as prints and enamel plates; and finally resolved in large triptych and five-panel paintings. Strange Holiday is a showcase of this tremendous body of work, a testament to the Gallery’s long relationship with the artist, and a rare opportunity to encounter this touchstone of masterful drawings, pastels, plates and paintings in one place.

In conversation with the exhibition of Matisse drawings and prints, Locks will present a concurrent exhibition of works on paper by prominent Philadelphia artist, Elizabeth Osborne. This exhibition, Homage to… features works that exemplify the artist’s process as well as her deep relationship to her models. Osborne, an artist greatly-influenced by Matisse’s use of color and light, explores interior space and decoration to create intimate portraits of her subjects, many of whom she remains close to, after having worked with them for decades. The watercolor studies and drawings featured in this exhibition are intensely personal—capturing, like Matisse, the individual spark of her models in rich blocks of color and simple lines.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present a selection of 1920s prints as well as 1930s drawings, which exemplify the expressive range and capability of Matisse’s line. These works are simple contour drawings depicting subjects deep in concentration, reading or watching fish in vague geometric- and floral-patterned spaces as well as fully-rendered, luxurious interiors that settle around languid nudes whose forward gazes are captured with simple strokes. By presenting these works as a group, the viewer may immerse themself in Matisse's process and glean the foundation of his painted and papercut masterpieces.

The past 60 years have seen the tide of abstract painting ebb and flow. Its time of death is called every few decades followed by a revival of representational art, the breakneck pace of technology, or the fickleness of the market. And yet, it is miraculously revived every so often—ostensibly for the first time. In its ineffability, it resists communion with contemporary fashion—refusing to serve as a cultural mirror or temporal guide. It is a language forged through materiality, negotiated agency, and distance. As a genre, “abstract painting” connects a rich genealogy of artists united by an ever-evolving syntax of vernaculars that weave a grand tradition only to splinter and reknot in unknowable formation. Taking its name from the work of early 20th century British poet, artist, and futurist, Mina Loy, Catch It & Lose It seeks a space between certainty and ambiguity, allowing the astonishing breadth of contemporary abstraction to propagate unhindered.

Anni Albers (1899 - 1994), Edna Andrade (1917 - 2008), and Dadamaino (1930 - 2004) each made outstanding contributions to the evolution of postwar abstraction during a period in which innovations by female artists were eclipsed by those of their male counterparts. Optical // Obstacle brings together works of art by these three pioneering female artists active around the mid-twentieth century.

Locks Gallery is pleased to present Soft Estate, an exhibition of new works by London-based artist Kate Bright (b. 1964). Bright’s previous series are well recognized for their incorporation of non- traditional material such as glitter, styrofoam, and glass in the portrayal of natural, non-figurative landscapes including scenes depicting glitter soaked snowfall, and glistening reflections on the surfaces of ponds and pools. In this new suite of paintings, the artist forgoes cooler seasons and the use of synthetic materials for vibrant depictions of wild British flora in saturated, tropical palettes. To accompany the exhibition, a new publication has been published by Locks Gallery to survey Bright’s 20 year career.

John Moore is a contemporary realist painter whose compositions primarily focus on post-industrial America. His paintings are imbued with the lingering energy of rusting steel, burnished wood, and built-up paint that comprise a familiar contemporary urbanism. In these composite scenes of skylines, city parks, and brick laden interiors, Moore fabricates compositions of physical locations and idealized memories, offering a contemplative renewal of the changing age of industry.