Painting Off the Canvas: Three New York Shows Where the Surface Is the Subject

♦ ♦ ♦ JUNE 27, 2026 | 3 MIN READ Painting Off the Canvas: Three New York Shows Where the Surface Is the Subject At a Glance Three New York painting shows on right now trade primed canvas for parchment, rice paper and bronze, and the support is the reason to go in person. Verdict: cross-town. At Hoffman Donahue on the Lower East Side, the painting s are the size of a paperback, and they pull a viewer in close before the reason is clear. Altoon Sultan paints farm machines in egg tempera on calfskin parchment, and the parchment does something primed canvas never does: it holds light inside the skin instead of bouncing it back off a white ground. The checklist says it without drama: “Big Wheel, 2026. Egg tempera on calfskin parchment stretched over a panel, 10 x 13 inches.” Ten by thirteen. It is one of three painting shows on Two Coats of Paint’s June gallery guide where the painter has walked off the primed canvas entirely, and once that pattern is visible it is hard to stop seeing. After a month of fairs, the most interesting painting in New York is happening on the support itself. Why three June shows left the canvas behind Down on Broome Street, Nancy Bowen’s “From A to Z and the Bodies in Between” (Nunu Fine Art, through July 25) builds pictures from gouache and cut-up dictionary pages glued onto rice paper. The printed text bleeds faintly through the sheet, so the ground is never silent the way gessoed cotton is. In Tribeca, Tran Luong’s “When Sky Merges with Earth” (Bortolami, through August 7) presses actual bronze into the picture: one canvas is listed as “Oil, acrylic, and collaged bronze on canvas, 47 1/4 × 78 3/4 in.” Parchment, paper, metal. Three painters, three answers to the same quiet decision, all on view at once. The thread is not a style or a subject. It is the moment the support stopped being the plumbing under the picture and became the picture. The support stopped being the plumbing and became the picture. How the support changes the way a painting has to be lit and hung This is where a working painter reads the room differently from a critic. A support is not a neutral backing; it has its own appetite for light, and the gallery either feeds it or fights it. Sultan’s calfskin glows from within and dies under a hard spotlight, so those parchment panels need soft, near-frontal light and a low, intimate hang that lets a person come to reading distance. Tran Luong’s bronze is the opposite animal: metal catches a raking beam and throws it back, so the angle of the light decides whether the inlay reads as image or as a flare across the surface. Bowen’s rice paper is thin enough that the wall behind it matters, the text wants the eye and not the lamp. One room cannot light all three the same way, and the galleries showing this work have given up the even museum wash for something tuned to each skin. That tuning is the show. It is also exactly what a phone camera deletes. The verdict: cross-town, because a booth can’t sell this on a p