Saturday, March 14, 2026 from 12–2pm
297 Tenth Avenue, New York
On the occasion of Robert Motherwell: Surface/Subject, Olney Gleason will host a two-part public program exploring the themes of gesture, materiality, and veiling at the heart of the exhibition.
The event is hosted by Matthew Holman, London-based art critic and writer, whose scholarship spans American modernism and postwar art. In the first part of the conversation, art historian and curator Megan Kincaid offers a close reading of Motherwell's practice, drawing on her research into modernist abstraction and the transnational currents that shaped mid-century American art. In the second part, artist Tony Lewis joins Holman to discuss his own work in relation to Motherwell’s, which similarly engages questions of gesture and surface through processes of mark-making and concealment. Lewis's solo exhibition opens at Olney Gleason in May 2026.
The program takes place on Saturday, March 14 from 12 to 2pm at 297 Tenth Avenue, New York. Attendance is free. Please RSVP to rsvp@olneygleason.com.
Presented in collaboration with The Dedalus Foundation, Robert Motherwell: Surface/Subject traces the artist's distinctive approach to developing his compositions through bold gestures, varied surface textures, and overlapping planes of color. Across painting, collage, and printmaking, Motherwell animated his surfaces with a wide range of blacks — sometimes as dense, unmodulated pigment, and sometimes in translucent veils that simultaneously enshroud and reveal his subjects. The exhibition brings together works that illuminate how the dynamism and intricacy of Motherwell's process gave rise to his subjects, including a significant work from the Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, Untitled (Elegy), 1975 — on view in a gallery exhibition for the first time after half a century in the same private collection — and Spanish Painting with the Face of a Dog, 1958/59/60, shown in Motherwell's landmark 1965 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, organized by Frank O'Hara.
The exhibition is accompanied by a new scholarly text by Matthew Holman and archival images documenting Motherwell's successive returns to individual works.
About Matthew Holman
Matthew Holman is an art critic and writer based in London. He teaches at The Courtauld Institute and the University of Hertfordshire, and holds a PhD in American curatorial history from University College London. He has held research and postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies in Berlin, and The Courtauld, where he was the Terra Foundation for American Art Fellow. He has written for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitechapel Gallery, Frieze, Apollo, the Financial Times, and Burlington Contemporary, among others. His first book, Frank O'Hara & MoMA: New York Poet, Global Curator, was published by Bloomsbury in 2025.
About DR. Megan Kincaid
Dr. Megan Kincaid is an art historian and curator. She serves on the Faculty of the Humanities & Social Sciences at The Cooper Union. Previously, she taught modern art and dance history at New York University. Her scholarship, taking the form of publications, art criticism, and exhibitions, has been supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the NYU Center for the Humanities, among others. Dr. Kincaid received her PhD from The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU (2024) and BA in Art History from Columbia University, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa (2017).
About Tony Lewis
The artist Tony Lewis expands the conceptual and material possibilities of drawing in a practice that spans large-scale works on paper, sculpture, collages, digital projections, and site-specific installations. Language, and its formal and material qualities, are central subjects in his work. Examining semiotics and drawing as parallel forms of abstraction, Lewis appropriates and adapts forms including the Roman alphabet and the phonetic symbols used in stenography. He lives and works in Chicago. His first New York solo exhibition opens at Olney Gleason in May 2026.
