Seven Paintings Hung Like a Clock Face: Amorelle Jacox at Management

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 03, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Seven Paintings Hung Like a Clock Face: Amorelle Jacox at Management At a Glance Amorelle Jacox's first New York solo turns the gallery into a clock; worth a deliberate downtown stop before it closes June 7. Walk into Management on East Broadway and the first thing that registers is not any single painting . It is the arrangement. Seven figures ring the room at even intervals, set at the positions of hours on a clock face. The wall reads before any one canvas does, and the wall is doing something deliberate. The show is “Mothers of Time,” Amorelle Jacox’s first New York solo, flagged in this month’s Two Coats gallery guide and closing June 7. Why the hang is the real measuring device The gallery is blunt about the conceit. The press text calls the show “a measuring apparatus, a metronome held across bodies, space, color, and light,” with the seven figures “surrounding the gallery like the ticks of a clock face.” Six of the canvases are the same size, 76 by 65 inches. The seventh, called Void, is only 40 by 30. That size break is the thing a painter notices first. Six matched formats placed at clock positions make the room itself the instrument; the eye walks the circle and counts. Then one tick comes up smaller, set apart, off the beat. Void is the missing hour, the gap in the measure. A critic reads the figures. What I read is the decision to make one of them the wrong size so the clock cannot quite close. Hung as a row, these would be a series. Hung as a ring with one short tick, the room becomes the painting and the absence becomes the subject. A room of seven figures hung like the hours, and one of them is the missing hour. What thin Gamsol layers let the paintings keep Up close the surfaces explain the title. Jacox builds with “thin layers of Gamsol-saturated oil paint,” and she lets the earlier layers stay visible, calling them “early time.” Gamsol is a thinner. Painting with that much of it means the colour goes down as a stain rather than a body, so nothing gets buried. Each face carries the ghost of its own earlier states. The painting is itself a clock that shows its elapsed making. That is the quiet rhyme between the material and the hang. The room measures time across seven bodies; each body measures time within one surface. The geometry she paints into the figures, the hourglasses and ellipses and bands of spectrum colour, stops reading as decoration and starts reading as the marks on a dial. The verdict, and where she goes next Nearby-only, and I mean that as a compliment to the work, not a knock on it. This is a small gallery and a first solo, and the show will not survive a phone photo: the clock only exists if you stand inside the ring of it. Anyone downtown before the 7th should give it twenty minutes in person. As for where Jacox is pointing, the size discipline is the tell. A painter who can hold six identical formats and then break the set once, on purpose, is thinking in systems rather than o