Perri Neri: caught looking

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 present the solo exhibition, Caught Looking 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 × 60 inch canvases. The result is a surprising departure: a focused investigation of the single face, a singular moment, and the contemporary selfie as a form of self-portraiture.

Caught Looking 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 of the entire internet, where the subject’s gaze meets the camera almost—but not quite—eye to eye.

These are not commissions. Each 16 × 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 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 Looking is conceived as an ongoing project, and its full strength will be revealed in its numbers. Neri intends to complete all submitted selfies 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 Looking is an exploration of how we present ourselves, how we are 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.