Three New York Shows Building the Image Out of the Dark

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 04, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Three New York Shows Building the Image Out of the Dark At a Glance Three New York painting shows start from the dark instead of the white canvas; two close June 6, so cross town this weekend and watch how each gallery lights the black. Walk into the Lindsay Adams show at Sean Kelly right now and the first thing the space does is go quiet and low. Adams builds her painting s up out of Lamp Black, a dense near-total black she lays down first and then pulls color forward through, and the gallery has lit them so the black stays black. Her show “SOIL” closes June 6. So does Emma Webster’s nocturnal forest at Petzel. Stand in front of either and it’s the same old decision made new: start from the dark, not the white. That’s the thread running through three New York shows I’d cross town for this week. Why a black ground changes what the room has to do Most painters start on a white or toned canvas and work toward the shadows. Adams, and the other two, go the other way. They lay the dark down first and lift the light out of it. The gallery text at Sean Kelly puts the idea plainly: “Rather than functioning solely as ground, black operates as a threshold of visibility.” Here’s the part a critic reviewing the figures tends to skip. A painting built up from black has almost no value floor. The whole image lives in the top of the tonal range, and the darks read as one connected field. Light it with a bright even wash, the way a high-key painting wants to be lit, and the emergence blows out. The figure stops rising from anywhere, the black goes flat and gray, and the thing that makes the painting work disappears. These paintings need low, raked, controlled light. Half the work is the room. Sean Kelly understood that. The biggest piece in the show is a diptych, 84 by 144 inches, and they gave it dim, directional light so the blues and pinks seem to surface on their own. Walk in expecting gallery-bright and you’d misread the whole room. Three different ways to start in the dark The thread holds across three very different hands. Adams works with literal pigment, Lamp Black, paint added and scraped back until color climbs out of the dark in layers. Across town at Jack Shainman, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s “Many A Moonlit Caveat” does it with dusk: her fictional figures are painted fast, wet into wet, emerging from brown-black grounds that never fully resolve into a room or a time. The title says moonlit, and the light behaves like it. Emma Webster builds her dark first inside a computer, modeling a nocturnal forest in VR before she paints it, so the night in her work is constructed twice over, once in software and once in oil. Three painters, one move. Lay the dark, then find the light. The verdict: cross town, and two close June 6 Cross town. Adams and Webster both close June 6, this weekend, so those two are the urgent ones. Yiadom-Boakye runs at Jack Shainman through July 31 across both New York spaces, so there’s time, but catch