Julian pozzi: Hole in Mouth

EXHIBITION DATES: May 26 – june 20, 2026

RECEPTION: Thursday, may 28, 5 - 8 pm

*Hole in Mouth,* 2025, Oil and acrylic on linen, 48 x 38 inches

*Braeburn Glen,* 2024, Oil and acrylic on linen, 40 x 32 inches

The Painting Center is pleased to present Days Folded, a solo exhibition by Nichole Gronvold Roller in the Project Room. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, May 26th, and remains on view through Saturday, June 20, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, May 28th, 2026, from 5 to 8 pm.

Julian Pozzi’s most recent work takes as its basis a practice of drawing into painting. His latest exhibition works within a framework of a structural abstraction built from a drawing and mark-making vocabulary developed over two decades.

The 15 paintings in "Hole in Mouth" allude to a space occupied both by the body and its discontents. The architectural and the organic often switch places only to resume their original position a few paintings later. Many of the works depict a fragility verging on collapse, or else show what seems to be the moments after disaster. The mark-making can vary and travel widely; what might begin as an incremental and patient cross-hatching can quickly lose its way and end up at the other end of the painting, fully submerged in and/or transformed by surprising pools of rich color, frankly formal and celebrating themselves.

This incessant push and pull (or, more precisely, overlap) between the built and the collapsed helps give the paintings an aesthetic charge that favors both beginnings and endings, often postponing or even skipping the middle entirely. While negotiating these two poles, Pozzi's canvases still manage to come to a resolution (or at least a place of rest a few steps ahead of an unfinished state). The paintings profit by just stopping short of being overworked in order to achieve a delicate, not-quite-equal equilibrium.

Julian Pozzi earned a BFA at the University of Texas at Austin and an MFA at CalArts. He’s had solo shows at Jeff Bailey Gallery (NY), 1234 Gallery (CA) and Songs For Presidents (NY). He has had group shows at White Columns (NY) and Atelier Cardenas Bellanger (Paris), among other venues. His work has been written about and reviewed in the New York Times and Particules journal, and he has had residencies at Jentel Artist Residency (WY), SIM Artist Residency (Iceland) and the Vermont Studio Center. He lives and works in Queens, NY.

For more information on the artist, visit: www.julianpozzi.com and @julian_pozzi.