Curated by Heidi Hahn and Tim Wilson These works and our readings of them, like much of our understanding of the perceptual world, are conjectures that serve as evidence of the porous threshold through which inert materials pass into thought.” -Tim Wilson Michael Kohn Gallery is thrilled to present Painting All Together. The group exhibition extends the ongoing dialogue of Painting as Is—a conversation grounded in the belief that painting remains a vital, self-reflexive medium for negotiating material, image, and subjectivity. This fourth installment, centered on artists living and working in Los Angeles, unfolds across five conceptual threads: inscription, object-hood, recollection, event, and projection. These frameworks are neither fixed nor exhaustive; they offer one lens among many for understanding how painting absorbs history while generating new forms and processes. The artists gathered here might belong to multiple modes at once, just as other possible frameworks—painting as language, painting as model, and, of course, painting as is, remain latent within the work. Emerging from a city shaped by climate volatility and pandemic aftermath, the exhibition casts painting as a shared language of persistence: a way of marking time, holding memory, and imagining community. Rather than a prescriptive program, this show asks what it means to paint in proximity; to material, to history, and to each other. Here, painting remains contingent—an ongoing negotiation between presence, perception, and the tactile demands of a world in flux. Painting as Inscription Painting is a durational act—its surfaces bear the imprint of time and touch. In Liat Yossifor’s scored monochromes, layers scraped to near erasure collapse figuration and abstraction, preserving gestures as inscribed memory. Where Yossifor carves inward, Andy Woll builds outward, using a recurrent mountain motif as a scaffold for chromatic improvisation, thick impasto turning repetition into a meditation on time. At the edge of painting and relief, Aryana Minai presses pigment into handmade paper, recalling ruin and ritual, materializing cultural memory through acts of reconstitution and repair. By contrast, Allison Schulnik renders inscription in excess, piling paint into melting anatomies where figure and ground dissolve in a choreography of decay. Within these works, inscription emerges through incision, accumulation, and compression—negotiating material resistance to envision painting not as representation but as something marked, built, and endured. Painting as Object Painting resists its limits—rejecting flatness and pictorial stability for constructed, sculptural form. Beneath industrial processes, Amir Nikravan’s buried drawings harden into matte panels that oscillate between glyph and minimalist object, layering traces of ornament, identity, and erasure beneath restraint. Unlike Nikravan’s smooth compression, Ry Rocklen sanctifies the mundane by casting paper towels, bread, and pizza crust into ceramic grids, turning disposable matter into ritualized monuments of daily life. Pushing object-hood toward fragility, Maddie Butler assembles obsolete printer trays and broken screens into architectures that haunt painting with the ruins of an image economy. Where Butler works with technological detritus, Evan Whale churns the density of Los Angeles into a photochemical stew, layering fragments through repetition and variation until they verge on painting—images reimagined as mutable objects echoing the physicality of what they depict. Across these varied strategies, painting becomes infrastructural—a framework that holds in order to be held. In each, surface is structure, and image is inseparable from the material conditions that shape it. Painting as Recollection Painting unfolds within a space of memory—where material and image trace the contours of loss and return. Built through slow revision and mediated fragments; film stills, music videos, personal recollections, Caitlin MacQueen’s canvases blur figures and interiors into atmospheric fields where presence falters and ambiguities becomes intimate. If MacQueen courts ambiguity, Sung Jik Yang seeks ephemerality, dissolving petals into tonal haze to transform still life into a fleeting interval rather than a fixed tableau. Where Yang’s temporality is intimate and hushed, Tahnee Lonsdale amplifies time into symbolic architecture, pressing totemic silhouettes against luminous fields to stage grief and faith as interlocking forces. Recollection splinters into archetype in Morteza Khakshoor’s glowing male figures, where myth and the mundane collide in dreamlike scenes drawn from obsessive sketching and cinematic memory, their gestures shifting between menace and tenderness. Amid the figures these artists traverse, memory takes on material weight—built from layers, erasures, and ghostly forms. Painting as Event Painting in a mode of instability—where gesture and process create forms in flux. Allison Miller builds paintings through accumulation and removal, tacking on shapes, scraping them back, folding in dirt and pencil, to produce surfaces that feel blunt yet precariously open. Pouring and manipulating acrylic and enamel across flat planes, Fritz Chesnut invokes waves, strata, and tectonics through gravity and control, dissolving the cosmic and the intimate by translating vast natural processes into sensual, optical events. Where Chesnut invokes geological slowness, Tomory Dodge accelerates, fracturing brushwork into a chromatic breakdown, dramatizing the instability of perception itself. Heather Brown pushes improvisation further, layering lines and shapes into structures that seem on the verge of collapse, animated by a restless, provisional energy. Through these various methods, painting emerges as an unfolding event—temporal, unstable, and insistently alive. Painting as Projection Painting reframed—through the lens of simulation, projection, and mediated perception. In a collaborative work, Victoria Fu and Matt Rich splice dye-printed fabrics and sewn canvas into hybrid forms that oscillate between tactile object and immaterial screen, asserting abstraction’s ability to inhabit both realms. Where this collaboration externalizes fragmentation, Fu’s solo works internalize it, layering photographic shards and digital effects into elastic fields that mimic painting’s haptic rhythms while remaining resolutely virtual. Erin Wright redirects trompe-l’œil toward design’s quiet authority, depicting cabinets with CAD-like exactitude, their banal objects poised between schematic and sensual. Together, these practices reframe painting as interface: a mutable skin where touch meets transmission, where material seduction and digital saturation become strange entanglements rather than opposites. ABOUT THE CURATORS Heidi Hahn creates introspective paintings that engage with the female body. Her sumptuously atmospheric and layered application of paint, in conversation with aesthetic traditions, draw the viewer into a psychological space that evokes our attachment to the female form and how that is processed through both a traditional and a contemporary reading. Gestural, fluid, and frequently spectral, Hahn’s works reframe and re-contextualize her subjects, exploring the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves. Hahn received her M.F.A. from Yale University in 2014, and was a Professor of Painting and Drawing at Alfred University, NY. She has been the recipient of several awards, residencies, and fellowships, including the Jerome Foundation Grant, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Residency, Madison, ME; and the Fine Arts Work Center Residency, Provincetown, MA, among others. Her work has been collected by Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, NL; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; and the Kadist Foundation, Paris, France. Her work has also been reviewed in numerous publications, including The New York Times and Art in America. Tim Wilson creates modestly scaled paintings that draw on pre-modernist modes of representation, holding them up as necessary models for seeing today. Echoes of Vermeer, Fantin-Latour, and Vuillard intermingle with the luminous palette of screens, television, and film. Through quiet motifs—stairways, foyers, bedside tables—these works slow perception, creating intimate spaces for contemplation, a meditative loop where history and meaning converge. Wilson received his M.F.A. from Yale University in 2013. He has presented solo exhibitions at Nathalie Karg Gallery in New York, Long Story Short in Paris, and Fahrenheit Madrid in Madrid. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at JDJ, Candice Madey, Jack Hanely, and Harper’s in New York, Cob Gallery and Taymour Grahne Projects in London, and Kadel Willborn in Düsseldorf, among others. Wilson has participated in residencies at The Lighthouse Works, LMCC Process Space, and Shandanken Projects, and his work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New Criterion, Juxtapoz, and The New York Times. Image: Morteza Khakshoor, Anthophile, 2025