True Colors

Freight + Volume is pleased to present “True Colors”, a summer group exhibition bringing together eight artists — Meghan Brady, Mary DeVincentis, Jai Hart, Riad Miah, Ilse Murdock, Julia Rooney, Cordy Ryman, and Paul Sevigny — whose works approach painting through color as structure, sensation, atmosphere, expression, and affect.

The exhibition’s title carries a double reference: first, to Anthony Haden-Guest’s legendary “True Colors” column in Vanity Fair, his chronicle of the downtown New York art world of the 1980s, where glamour, performance, visibility, and hidden dynamics continuously overlapped. Here, however, “True Colors,” while still functioning as a tell-all of sorts, shifts its object of disclosure to a situation in which authenticity and performance, mood and form, surface and revelation fold into one another.

In this moment, marked by political turmoil, digital saturation, and acceleration, this exhibition seeks solace in painting’s capacity for pleasure, intensity, and artistic freedom while simultaneously probing its emotional, optical, and psychological potential. Moving through visuality, formalism, and décor, the works on view treat painting as subject, framework, and a proposition. Each artist explores how color mediates surface and form to articulate complex relations, perceptual states, and influence. What is at stake is not simply color as appearance, but color as something capable of organizing feeling, perception, memory, and attention while simultaneously exposing its instability and indeterminacy.

The exhibition draws on a lineage extending from Eugène Delacroix and Romanticism through Symbolism, post-Impressionism, the Fauves, Wassily Kandinsky, and the Color Field painters, where color increasingly detached itself from description in order to function as atmosphere, sensation, and a subjective force. Within this trajectory, however, “True Colors” does not present color as pure expression or interior truth. It accepts that “truth” now arrives mediated, staged, coded, circulated, and performed, inseparable from the contemporary conditions through which images, identities, and affects are produced and consumed.

Through distinct material and formal strategies, these conditions circulate within “True Colors”, shaping the work of the participating artists. Cordy Ryman‘s linked wooden constructions make color inseparable from substance, armature, and residue, while Mary DeVincentis‘s psychologically charged compositions hover at the edge of dissolution. Jai Hart‘s sewn, stuffed, and densely patterned fabric works push painting toward bodily objecthood. Julia Rooney‘s intimate paintings filter abstraction through the visual logic of illuminated screens and digital interfaces, while Ilse Murdock‘s landscape-derived works suspend color and imagery between immediacy and atmosphere. Riad Miah‘s illusionistic shaped canvases compress gesture and process into dense chromatic configurations; Paul Sevigny‘s compositional constraints test how little is required for color to generate spatial and structural variation; and Meghan Brady‘s cut-paper-like geometries transform color into rhythms, intervals, and movement.

Across these artists, color does not consolidate into a single mode but persists as a distributed condition of substance, depiction, and impact, linking otherwise divergent practices through a shared investment in color as physical matter under contemporary conditions. This diversity of approach marks this exhibition: each artist develops a distinct medium and formal engagement with color, from salvaged wood to stained fabric, from screen-scaled paint to cut paper. Taken together, the artists suggest that the Romantic pursuit persists across abstract, narrative, and figurative modes alike, even as that pursuit now arrives mediated and performed through contemporary image culture. What binds them further is the way each artist uses color to re-enter the figural — to renegotiate how form, surface, space, and relation are assembled, sensed, and sustained.

What emerges from “True Colors” is not a unified position but a shifting set of models through which color conveys attention, feeling, perception, and experience. The works do not resolve the tension between painting as image, object, surface, or event; rather, they hold those conditions in suspension. In this sense, color functions simultaneously as tactile presence and unstable sign — something seen, sensed, staged, performed, and continually reconfigured.

Saul Ostrow

Gallery hours Tue-Sat 11 am – 6 pm

Exhibition Duration 13 June – 18 July 2026

www.freightandvolume.com

Location:
Freight + Volume
39 Lispenard St.
10013 New York, NY
United States