Perri Neri: caught almost eye to eye

EXHIBITION DATES: April 28 – may 23, 2026

RECEPTION: Thursday, april 30, 5 - 8 pm

closing RECEPTION: Saturday, may 23, 4 - 6 pm

 The Painting Center is pleased to announce the solo exhibition, “Caught, Almost Eye to Eye,” by artist Perri Neri, featuring an intimate series of portrait paintings born from a radical shift in practice and a contemporary experiment in collaboration. The exhibition will run from April 28 May 23, 2026 with an opening reception on Thursday, April 30 from 5-8 pm.

Known for large-scale abstract figurative paintings that explore bodies moving through space and the simultaneity of multiple truths, Neri faced an unexpected turning point when studio constraints forced her to abandon her signature 72 x 60-inch canvases. The result is a surprising departure: a focused investigation of the single face, the singular moment, and the contemporary selfie as a form of self-portraiture. 

Caught, Almost Eye to Eye began with a simple call to action on social media. Neri invited her followers—some close friends, others virtual strangers—to submit selfies for her to interpret in paint. Within one day, she received over 30 entries. The project taps into the currency of our image-saturated age: the carefully composed self-portrait meant for an audience of intimates or the entire internet, where the subject’s gaze meets the camera almost—but not quite—eye to eye. 

The works in this exhibition represent the first completed paintings from that larger body of material. While Neri had hoped to realize all of the submitted portraits before the opening, the process was shaped by life—including the loss of her mother, whose final days called her away from the studio. Ten paintings will be on view at the opening, each one carrying the full weight of her attention and care. 

These are not commissions. Each 16 x 12-inch painting is Neri’s interpretation, rendered in a direct, painterly realism rather than photographic precision. The uniform scale creates a democratic grid of contemporary faces, each offered up voluntarily, each claiming space. Participants receive a print of their portrait; if a work sells, they share in the proceeds—a gesture that acknowledges collaboration and complicates traditional artist-subject dynamics. 

Caught, Almost Eye to Eye is conceived as an ongoing project, and its full strength will be revealed in its numbers. Neri intends to complete all submitted portraits and present the work in its entirety in the near future. In this way, The Painting Center exhibition is less a conclusion than an introduction—a first glimpse of a series whose ambition mirrors her earlier investigation of the moving body across large canvases: a multiplicity of presences, each distinct, accumulating into something greater than the sum of its parts. 

In moving from multiplicity to singularity, from sweeping gesture to concentrated gaze, Neri has found new terrain. Caught, Almost Eye to Eye is an exploration of how we present ourselves, how we’re seen, and what happens when the artist’s hand mediates the self-image we broadcast to the world.

Perri Neri is an artist and curator working in New York City and Boston. She is the founder and former creative director of Living Room - NYC and founder and creative director of Refrigerator Poetry Visual Art Archive. Neri holds an MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute and has had solo exhibitions at The Painting Center and Ceres Gallery in New York City. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Caelum Gallery and AIR Gallery in Brooklyn, and a retrospective was exhibited at The Morean Center for the Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida (2020). Additional exhibitions include the Orlando Museum of Art, Polk Museum of Art, and Tampa Museum of Art. Her curatorial projects include "I Am My Best Work" (2020), "New Optics" (2020), "Truth, Beauty, Freedom, Love" (2021), and "Indivisible Spectrum" (2022). Neri's work has been featured in Studio Visit Magazine and Honeysuckle Magazine.