Visual Weight

Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present Visual Weight. This group exhibition will open Wednesday, October 14 with a 6-8 pm opening reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Ave., Fl. 3), open to the public.

Included in Visual Weight are works by: Marina Adams, Richard Diebenkorn, Camilla Engström, Marie Hazard (Ad Hoc), Sheree Hovsepian, Anna Kunz, Eddie Martinez, Julie Mehretu, Gabriel Mills, Joan Mitchell, and Yoab Vera.

Visual Weight surveys how artists find compositional balance within abstraction. Whether purely abstract or informed by landscape or the figure, these works often balance colors, shapes, and textures in a state of productive instability that generates distinct emotional registers.

Pattern and structure emerge as organizing elements for several artists in this exhibition. Julie Mehretu draws on extensive research into patterns of movement and architectural diagrams, translating them into ambiguous representations of complex spatial relationships. As Marina Adams has stated, “We can see pattern in the most basic things. It’s in basic truths that we can find communion.” In her paintings, Adams returns to interlocking geometric forms that suggest connection and the way forms fit within—or spill beyond—a given space. Similarly, Anna Kunz’s soft, arcing lines seep into and lean on one another in what she calls “productive instability.”

Color is, for many artists, a guiding compositional device. Across the exhibition, color draws areas of a work forward or pushes them back, creating tension as the eye moves around the work. For Kunz, color creates its own structure, rather than geometric order. Her compositions are also informed by her body: she paints standing over the work, comparing the scale of its forms to her own. For Gabriel Mills, color and atmospheric perspective construct an optical space without relying on linear perspective. This optical space appears to extend beyond the painting’s physical surface, while its heavily textured paint reaches out into the room and asserts the work’s weighty material presence. Similarly, Marie Hazard explores the spiral as both image and material structure: it appears in her drawing Ad Hoc Spiral and is echoed in the spools of thread woven into All that Glitters.

The body enters the exhibition both through the process of making and through direct references to the figure. Sheree Hovsepian and Eddie Martinez engage the body more directly in their work. Hovsepian assembles gelatin silver prints of cropped photographs of her sister with ceramics, nylon, string, and wood, constructing semblances of bodies. These assemblages hover in a precarious balance against their black linen background. In Fixed, mirrored and rotated photographs of a figure’s back are held together by spiraling ceramics of various sizes and enveloped within an oval of nails. Throughout Eddie Martinez’s abstract compositions, cartoon-like faces, eyes, skulls, butterflies, tennis balls, and improvised forms recur and mutate, emerging from and dissolving back into the surrounding composition.

Just as some artists draw on the body in their process or subject matter, others turn to the natural world. Camilla Engström intuitively paints imagined landscapes of curving forms that capture movement verging on abstraction. Flowing rivers echo the shapes of tree branches and flowers, and reflections on water become a wash of undulating color. Yoab Vera uses the horizon as a recurring compositional structure. His modular paintings begin with geometric abstraction, while intuitive mark-making introduces references to natural phenomena. Textured bands of saturated color suggest horizons suspended within an airy atmosphere, while circles representing the sun—or flowers hovering low in the sky—introduce further sensations of weight and weightlessness. Richard Diebenkorn’s 1977 work on paper was made during the period of his Ocean Park paintings, which drew inspiration from the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica. Its simplified geometric forms and airy layers of paint gesture toward elements of landscape: horizon, sky, and atmosphere. Similarly, Joan Mitchell’s rhythmic, layered fields of color draw on her surroundings to evoke a sense of place or experience. Her painting in this exhibition was created during her years in Vétheuil, France, when the colors of the surrounding landscape became an important source for her richly atmospheric work.

In Visual Weight, pattern, feeling, the body, and the natural world shape how abstraction is perceived and understood. The imagery oscillates between groundedness and instability, weight and weightlessness, and everything in between.

Press release by Kirsten Cave, adapted from the artists’ statements.

Visual Weight will run at Alexander Berggruen (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3) from October 14-November 18, 2026. The exhibition’s preview is available upon request. For all inquiries, please contact the gallery at info@alexanderberggruen.com.