Current Exhibitions

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Past Exhibitions

March 19 – April 14, 2026

Forms and Fields: Andreé Brown, Marilyn Church, and Veronica Lawlor

Beautiful Collision: Stephen Cimini and Christopher Skura

On The Wall: Tree Line: Joy Nagy

Reception: Thursday, March 19, 6 - 8pm
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Carter Burden Gallery presents three exhibitions: Forms and Fields in the East Gallery featuring Andreé Brown, Marilyn Church, and Veronica Lawlor in an exploration of figure and landscape; Beautiful Collision in the West Gallery featuring Stephen Cimini and Christopher Skura in a dialogue between structure and intuition; and On the Wall featuring the installation Tree Line by Joy Nagy, featuring large-scale graphite drawings that explore the physical and symbolic presence of trees. The reception will be on Thursday, March 19 from 6pm to 8pm. The exhibitions run from March 19 - April 14, 2026, at 548 West 28th Street in New York City. The gallery hours are Tuesday - Friday, 11 a.m. - 5 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.

Forms and Fields

Forms and Fields unite the work of Andreé Brown, Marilyn Church, and Veronica Lawlor in an exploration of the visual and conceptual connections between the human form and the natural world. Marilyn Church and Veronica Lawlor engage in a painterly dialogue from opposite directions: Church moves from the figure toward abstraction, while Lawlor moves from abstraction toward landscape, marked by recurring leaf motifs. This leaf motif resonates with Andree Brown’s sculpture, echoing the verdant greens found throughout Lawlor’s work. Opening at the start of spring, the exhibition reflects on growth, renewal, and the shared language between bodies and plants, where terms such as “limb” and “trunk” blur distinctions between figure and field, revealing nature and humanity as deeply intertwined.

Andreé Brown

As a sculptor, Andreé Brown is drawn to organic forms that surprise and delight her, seeking to capture their essence through simple, minimal structures. Living in a small Manhattan apartment has deepened her desire to bring nature into her daily life, inspiring her to create sculptural forms based on leaves, branches, and trees. Recent residencies in Chianti, Italy, and Marnay-sur-Seine, France, strengthened her focus on indigenous plants and led to projects such as Leaves of Greve. Working primarily in green wax, Brown enlarges and alters natural forms to shift perspective and heighten awareness of climate change. Her multi-angled sculptures invite viewers to experience each piece emotionally and imaginatively, revealing new interpretations as they move through space.

Andreé Brown is a contemporary sculptor whose work centers on abstracted leaf forms inspired by the natural environment. She earned her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and has exhibited in Boston and at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. She later founded ADB INC., a jewelry design firm represented in major museum shops, including The Textile Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art, and the American Folk Art Museum. Since 2022, Brown has completed four artist residencies in natural settings. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Museum of Encaustic Art, and her recent solo exhibition at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art highlighted the development of her leaf series. She recently completed a residency at ACEA in Marnay-sur-Seine, France.

Veronica Lawlor

Veronica Lawlor’s practice is rooted in immersive, on-site drawing that engages directly with wild landscapes and urban environments. Attuned to subtle energies and cycles of life, she is especially drawn to liminal spaces where nature and human history intersect. Her location drawings become points of departure in the studio, where she deconstructs and reconstructs visual forms into layered, psycho-aesthetic palimpsests of experience. Through a dynamic interplay of line, texture, and color, Lawlor gives shape to forgotten moments and the emotional narratives embedded within the world around us.

Veronica Lawlor works at the intersection of illustration and abstraction and has spent more than 25 years creating award-winning reportage drawings for clients worldwide. Her expressionistic on-site practice explores the sensation of place through formal aesthetic concerns, which she brings into her studio paintings. Her work has been exhibited by the United Nations, Mystic Seaport Museum, The Society of Illustrators, and numerous galleries and institutions. Her drawings were presented at the Louvre after she was selected as the North American representative for the Canson Prix in 2011. Lawlor is on the faculty of Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute, and the Woodstock School of Art, and conducts reportage workshops internationally. She lives and works in New York City and the Hudson Valley.

Marilyn Church

Although Marilyn Church’s work often borders on abstraction, it consistently returns to the human body as its central subject. For her, the body is the primary vehicle for expressing the elusive, changing, and mysterious nature of lived experience. Her paintings explore emotional and psychological states through a journey into the unconscious, where visual themes emerge that reflect shared archetypes and intuitive knowledge. Through this process, Church seeks to give form to inner experience and universal human feeling.

Marilyn Church is an abstract figurative painter and former courtroom artist for The New York Times and major television networks. She earned her BFA from Pratt Institute and completed MFA studies at Indiana University. The emotional intensity of her courtroom work continues to inform her paintings, which are grounded in improvisation, dreams, and intuition. The Library of Congress holds more than 4,500 of her works. Her solo exhibitions include shows at Carter Burden Gallery, Susan Eley Gallery, Lucore Gallery, and Bernaducci Meisel Gallery. Church has received a New York Press Art Award and a Television Emmy for her drawings, and her book The Art of Justice was published in 2006.

Beautiful Collision

Beautiful Collision brings together two distinct yet deeply compatible practices that investigate structure, perception, and the emergence of form. Through painting and sculpture, Stephen Cimini’s and Christopher Skura’s distinctive approach to construction, one architectural and measured, the other intuitive and psychologically charged, create a dynamic visual dialogue. Beautiful Collision is not about synthesis or resolution, but about proximity. By placing two distinct methodologies in direct conversation, the exhibition allows differences to remain visible and active. The collision is beautiful precisely because of the tension, inviting viewers to engage with contrast, structure, and intuition as parallel forces shape perception.

Stephen Cimini 

Stephen Cimini’s work approaches form architectonically. Built through spatial logic, proportion, and layered construction, his paintings function as internal architectures rather than images of external space. Using oil paint and cold wax, Cimini creates dense, tactile surfaces where interlocking geometries appear stable yet quietly in motion. Color is restrained and deliberate, allowing structure and material to guide perception. Meaning is not prescribed but revealed through sustained looking, as shapes shift between figure and ground.

Originally from the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Cimini first studied fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute and eventually moved back east to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He wrestled with various art forms from wood constructed sculpture to conceptual environments before landing on abstract painting something he loved from an early age. In 1994, he began developing the vocabulary for his current work, which originates from the linear landscape of Manhattan. It has since mutated to geometric spaces and their relationships to each other while still adhering to its architectural origins. His fascination with the mystery of color is also a vital aspect of his work.

Christopher Skura

 Christopher Skura’s work occupies the space between the organic and the engineered. Drawing from Cubism, street art, and intuitive mark-making, his paintings and sculptures fragment the figure into hybrid systems that suggest consciousness rather than representation. Eyes recur as both motif and anchor—signals of awareness embedded within shifting, mechanical-organic forms. His sculptures echo this language in three dimensions, where plant-like growth and industrial structure coexist, reinforcing themes of psychology, emergence theory, and the body as a living system.

Christopher Skura is a visual artist and fine art conservator living in Manhattan for 30 years. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree and a professional certificate in sculpture from the Ringling College of Art and Design and an Associate’s degree in Liberal Arts from New York University. In addition, Skura studied ceramic sculpture with Peter Gourfain at Greenwich House Pottery in New York City, drawing with Mark Barnett, Nicki Orbach and Leonid Gervits at The Art Students League of New York, stained-glass design and construction at The Peters Valley School of Craft, painting and ceramics at The Florida Gulf Coast Art Center in Belleair and philosophy with Paul Edwards at The New School University.

Tree Line

Tree Line, an installation by Joy Nagy in the space On the Wall, is a visual study of trees rendered in graphite on paper. Measuring six feet in height, each work stands at human scale, transforming the wall into a forest of upright forms that evoke a sense of standing amongst a crowd. Each portrait conveys the tenacity, strength, and quiet power of this enduring species while drawing subtle parallels to the human form. Trunks, branches, scars, and textures echo anatomical features, like spines, limbs, and skin, suggesting a relationship between humanity and the natural world. Nagy’s practice is rooted in personal history, lived experience, and an ongoing engagement with nature. Family narratives, memory, and observation shape her approach, allowing each endeavor to emerge from both emotional and material inquiry. Working across drawing, painting, ceramics, installation, audio, and assemblage, Nagy selects her media based on what best serves each project. In Tree Line, graphite becomes both tool and metaphor, capable of expressing delicacy and density, fragility and permanence.

The installation reflects on the role of trees as observers to human life and transformation. As Suzi Gablik writes in Magritte: “Growing from the earth towards the sun, a tree is an image of certain happiness… When we are moving, it is the tree which becomes the spectator… It is witness… to the more or less agitated spectacle of our life… The tree, having become a coffin, disappears into the earth. And when it is transformed into fire, it vanishes into the air.” Joy Nagy’s Tree Line affirms drawing as a powerful, immersive medium and positions the tree not only as a natural object, but as a living archive, bearing witness to personal histories, collective memory, and the fragile balance between humanity and the environment.

Joy Nagy, a native New Yorker, earned an Associate Degree of Applied Science at Fashion Institute of Technology where she majored in Apparel Design and has studied at The New York Studio School with Graham Nickson, The Art Students League in New York City with anatomist Frank Porcu, and the Bottega del Tintoretto in Venice, Italy. She has been shown in in solo exhibitions at The Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, New York City; Goggle Works Center for the Art, Reading Pennsylvania; The Staten Island Museum, New York; Koussevitzky Art Gallery, Massachusetts; Moray Art Centre, Findhorn, Scotland; and curated in group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. Nagy has been awarded artist residencies at Jentel Artist Residency, Banner, Wyoming; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont; Heliker-LaHoton Foundation, New York; Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York; Governors Island Residency, New York; Saltonstall Foundation, New York; and Ox-Bow, Michigan where she received the Centennial Artist Award. She was recently awarded ‘The President Purchase Prize’ from Huntley College of Agriculture at Cal Poly Pomona. Nagy currently lives and works in Manhattan.

Tree Line is on view until June 23, 2026.

Installation Views