Jane Zweibel: Dreams in action

EXHIBITION DATES: Sep 1 – 26, 2026

RECEPTION: Thursday, Sep 10, 5 - 8 pm

The Painting Center is pleased to announce the solo exhibition Dreams in Action by Jane Zweibel in the Project Room. The exhibition will run from September 1 through September 26, 2026, with an opening reception on Thursday, September 10, from 5 to 8 pm.

Known for paintings that push the boundaries of figuration and that investigate aspects of human experience and female identity, Zweibel’s canvases are characterized by vibrant color, distortion, a cartoon-like sensibility, and uncanny juxtapositions. The series Dreams in Action began during painting breakthroughs that occurred while Zweibel attended two artist residencies in 2024. Utilizing collages as points of departure, she begins each painting with a loose grid of abstract shapes and colors, followed by free-associative figurative imagery worked into the grid. The imagery is culled from a range of sources, including personal and collective experience, memory, psychology, mythology, and art history. The resulting paintings became non-linear narratives, like the scrambled chapters of a novel.

The small-scale acrylic paintings in Dreams in Action are not portrayals of Zweibel’s own dreams, but depictions of invented dream worlds: multiverses where boundaries between past and present, real and mythic, are indistinct. Throughout this body of work, Zweibel is interested in visualizing dream logic, and in delivering the fantastical with the force of reality by merging fact and fiction. Dreams that occur during sleep are passive visions, in that they seem to “happen” to the dreamer. The dream states depicted in Zweibel’s painted microcosms are, by contrast, vividly active and alive.

Jane Zweibel is an artist from New York City, currently living and working in Mexico City. Zweibel holds an MFA in Painting from Columbia University, and a BA in Visual Art from Bennington College. She is the recipient of fellowships and residency awards from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Bronx Museum Artist in the Marketplace Program, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Banff Centre for the Arts, among others. Zweibel has been awarded grants from the Puffin Foundation and Artist’s Fellowship, Inc., and was a finalist for the Tree of Life Foundation Grant. Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, the New York Times, Hyperallergic, and Fiberarts Magazine. Zweibel has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in the US and abroad, including Baang and Burne Contemporary, New York; AIR Gallery, Brooklyn; Museum for Art and Culture, New Rochelle, New York; The Transit Museum, Brooklyn, NY; Leslie’s Art Gallery, Luxembourg; Chaffers Gallery, New Zealand; and Hashtag Gallery, Mexico City.

For more information on the artist, visit www.jzweibel.com