seen & Unseen
EXHIBITION DATES: January 7 - 31, 2026
RECEPTION: Thursday, January 8, 2025, 5 - 8 pm
The Painting Center is pleased to present Seen and Unseen, a group exhibition uniting artists whose works navigate the shifting boundaries between clarity and obscurity, the material and the ephemeral, the revealed and the concealed. Across abstraction, landscape, figuration, and experimental surface, these artists explore how meaning forms not only through what we observe but through what evades our grasp.
Across these varied works, perception becomes a fluid experience: forms dissolve into atmosphere, gestures accumulate into dense visual fields, and familiar objects or environments take on new significance through distortion, layering, or absence. Seen and Unseen traces the subtle interplay between clarity and ambiguity, between the physical and the psychological, between surface and depth.
The artists in this exhibition move through interior and exterior terrains—forests, shorelines, roadsides, domestic spaces, and imagined fields of color and mark. Some works evoke memory through hazy atmospheres or dissolving silhouettes; others contend with the raw immediacy of material, registering impulse, repetition, and touch. Certain works hinge on the ghostliness of presence—an abandoned pair of glasses, a fragmented portrait, bodies sheltered beneath patterned cloth—while others vibrate with energy, gesture, or the elemental forces of nature. The exhibition also presents works that hover near silence—delicate threads of line floating across pale grounds, faint notations that resemble breath, wind, or murmured speech. These works articulate the unseen as a form of resonance, something felt long before it is fully perceived.
Expanding upon these themes, the works in Seen and Unseen challenge fixed perception, suggesting that seeing is not a singular act but a layered process. Marks are erased as quickly as they appear; images waver between formation and dissolution. Through these strategies, the works echo the nuances of memory, the mutability of landscapes, and the unstable nature of contemporary life. What emerges is a shared, though varied, pursuit: an inquiry into how the seen world is shaped by what lies beneath it—emotion, intuition, history, and the unconscious. Whether through the translucency of layered color, the suggestion of figures moving at the edge of sight, or the tactile density of paint that resists immediate legibility, each artist contributes to a collective meditation on presence and absence. Together, their works create a visual terrain where revelation is never absolute, and where the unseen continually informs what comes into view.
Seen and Unseen offers a contemplative space, encouraging viewers to slow down, look closely, and engage with the complexities that surface when images resist definitive interpretation. This exhibition asks the viewer to surrender certainty and attend to nuance. Each work reveals its content slowly, rewarding patient observation. Patterns emerge, motions repeat, and spectral figures linger long after one walks away. We reconsider what happens when vision is not enough—when knowing requires feeling, and seeing becomes a gesture of care.
Artists include: Robin Adsit, Susan Barrett, Bradley Butler, Richard Glick, Mary Hafeli, Kirstine Rainer Hansen, Elizabeth Johnson, Wendy Kawabata, Renee Khatami, Sharon Lacey, Jan Lhormer, Tai Lipan, Cara London, Laura Ann Perry, Liza Philips, Sue Rollins, Alicia Rothman, Virginia Sharkey, Kevin Sloan, Gene Underwood, and Laura Ahola Young.
