WARREN ISENSEE | 8 JANUARY - 14 FEBRUARY 2026

"Isensee’s new paintings strike me as more complex overall in their spatial connotations, and freer in their willingness to break the bottom-to-top chromatic certainties of where colors should go to complete patterns. A great example is Crepuscule Plot (2025), where negative and positive shapes interlace in a radiant, now softly rectilinear, mandalic organization without any rectilinear shapes at all. The banding is most pronounced in the negative shapes and is darker along the bottom exterior row, moving in stages of softening contrast from the middle to the top. At no place do the interior colors in the positive shapes change their color, but the Albersian effect of simultaneous contrast suggests that they move from shadow to light. Pointedly, this entire effect is a path out of chromatic symmetry, or mirroring, and into a freeing dynamism."

- Stephen Westfall in "What Emerges"

WARREN ISENSEE (b. 1956 in Asheville, NC) studied architecture at the University of Oklahoma before majoring in painting and graphic design. In 1999, he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and, in 2007, received the Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters after participating in the annual Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts.

His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Danese/Corey, New York, NY; Kevin Bruk Gallery, Miami, FL; Massimo Audiello, New York, NY; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Tricia Collins Contemporary Art, New York, NY; and Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT.

Isensee has been included in group exhibitions at institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI; Herter Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY; The National Arts Club, New York, NY; and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS, amongst others.

His work may be found in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, TX; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Museum of Contemporary Art Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Neuberger Berman Collection, New York, NY; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; and The Penn Art Collection, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, amongst others.

The artist lives and works in New York, NY.