Warren Isensee
EXHIBITION REVIEW: WARREN ISENSEE’S PULSATING ABSTRACTIONS PUT THE ACT OF LOOKING TO THE TEST
New at Miles McEnery Gallery, Warren Isensee’s latest paintings amplify simultaneous contrast, pushing patterned color into buoyant spatial play.
A measured instability runs through Warren Isensee’s new paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery: patterns hold, then slip, as chromatic systems tilt from symmetry toward drift.
On view through February 14, 2026, in Chelsea, New York, the exhibition marks the New York-based artist’s third solo outing with the gallery and is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Stephen Westfall.
The new works extend Isensee’s long-standing commitment to optical structure while loosening its rules. Warm and cool tones trade dominance across repeating frameworks, producing a steady pulse of vibration without resorting to overt illusion. The images can feel diagrammatic at first glance, but their charge is more cognitive than schematic—color and pattern behaving like perception itself, shifting with attention.
Compared with earlier bodies of work that emphasize mirroring and closure, this group is more willing to interrupt its own logic. Some canvases sustain a tight internal consistency, while others introduce irregular breaks that reroute the eye: clusters of lines that accelerate, hesitate, or double back. The result is less a display of visual effects than a test of looking, where adjacency and repetition continually reset what feels stable.
New York, NY: Miles McEnery Gallery, “Warren Isensee,”
8 January - 14 February 2026.
Westfall, writing in the accompanying publication, reads the shift as an expansion of spatial ambition. He observes how “Isensee’s new paintings strike me as more complex overall in their spatial connotations, and freer in their willingness to break the bottom-to-top chromatic certainties of where colors should go to complete patterns.” He continues, “At no place do the interior colors in the positive shapes change their color, but the Albersian effect of simultaneous contrast suggests they move from shadow to light. Pointedly, this entire effect is a path out of chromatic symmetry, or mirroring, into a freeing dynamism.”
Isensee’s biography helps clarify the paintings’ hybrid logic of control and release. Born in 1956 in Asheville, North Carolina, he studied architecture at the University of Oklahoma before shifting to painting and graphic design, a background that still registers in the work’s sense of constructed order. Over the past two decades, he has received recognition, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and a Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his work is held in museum and corporate collections in the U.S. and abroad.
Warren Isensee’s work is on view through February 14, 2026, at Miles McEnery Gallery, 511 West 22nd Street, New York.
Artnet News —
