The two exhibitions currently on view at Bowery Gallery reflect distinctly different temperaments. Rita Baragona’s landscapes and still lifes – despite their brisk color and brushwork – show a fundamental allegiance to nature, while Naomi Nemtzow’s mixed media works revel in abstracted forms and patterns. Baragona confines herself to conventionally rectangular formats, while Nemtzow explores shaped and collaged surfaces. Both artists’ work, however, shows an enthusiasm for the rhythmic power of lines and colors. (By way of disclosure, I should mention that as a Bowery member I have known both artists for many years.)

Followers of Baragona’s work will instantly recognize her motifs: the garden scenes, the still lifes with bouquets, the seashore views of churning waves. A glance at her latest work confirms that she is a colorist – a painter who animates through pressures and locations of color.

The beginning point for these paintings is self-evidently first-hand observation. “Blooming Cadences – Garden 1” (2025), is executed in acrylic on paper, but – as for many of the artist’s works – the paint is applied so thinly as to resemble watercolor. Here, three trails of color-splotches – radiant red-orange, limpid light yellow, sprite pink – distribute themselves over a medium green rising up through the sheet’s lower three-quarters. Though rapidly brushed in, their colors are keenly modulated, becoming sun-splashed punctuations of a large, mounding bush. The purely visual turns tangible, acquiring height, breadth and gravity. A few almost casual dark horizontal brushstrokes at the top aren’t entirely identifiable, but they elicit an additional experience: the leap in depth to a distant landscape.

Baragona’s method of interjecting a spare, linear network with weighted color sequences is especially apparent in her seashore scenes. In “Moment by Moment” (2024), small darts of dark paint measure out the roiling expanse of the ocean, as well as – up front – the bright, curling crash of a wave on sand. We sense grave forces reaching their radiant denouement.

“Moment by Moment” is accompanied by several sketchbook pages covered with the artist’s handwritten notes as well as tiny landscape and still life paintings. The elemental dynamism of these small images is one of the highlights of the exhibition, while the accompanying texts, which include statements such as “All matter is vibrational color beneath surface solidity” and “No whereness only whenness – awareness floating,” amount to a voice-over of the artist's distinctive thinking.

By contrast, Nemtzow’s work, which is constructed from layers of cut and painted paper, record the world with luminous indirection. Her abstracted forms spring from conceptions as much as observation, and connect not through natural light but a schema of serpentine dots and dashes. In the larger pieces, the effect is reminiscent of an automatist boardgame (think Snakes & Ladders – Abstract-Expressionist Edition), or Cubist treasure maps, or just possibly, plankton soirees. The artist refuses to be bound by a conventionally rectangular format; about half the works in the show, sporting highly irregular shapes, feel self-generated, centripetally, from a kind of inner compulsive core.

Like Baragona, Nemtzow locates forms through color pressures. But instead of characterizing the visual world, Nemtzow’s hues pace out her forms’ internal eccentricities. In the mixed media piece “This Way, Please” (2024), accents of red and gray set off a march of vertical-tending ultramarine blues – deep, spacious – and yellows ranging from jazzily electric to earthily mellow. Strands of blue and brown curl in their path, periodically curbing their progress.

On another wall, the large, irregularly shaped “With Claws and Teeth” (2026) incorporates small curious notations of towers, oars and a flag, as well as a conspicuously toothy maw. But its first impact – at once organic and mechanistic in effect – is one of milling chards of blue, ochre, and an elusive green interspersed with adamant blacks and whites.

Yet another wall features an array of nine intimately scaled works. Among these shaped pieces “Fish City” (2025) boasts the pastel blues and yellows of an angelfish, but also the thorny textures of a battleship. This burly piece seems set to collide with “Coming in for a Landing” (2025), which could hardly be more different; with its muted green-grays and delicately curling layers, it suggests the dainty decent of an android angel.

Are we witnessing fierce predations and close escapes? Congenial menageries? Cozy tête-à-têtes? One’s tempted to say all the above, all at once. With every encounter animated in color and line, it all engages.

Both exhibitions are on view Feb 24-March 21, 2026

Bowery Gallery
547 W 27 St, Suite 508, New York NY 10001
646.230.6655 · www.bowerygallery.org
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