Builders

Halsey McKay Gallery is pleased to present Builders, a group exhbition that considers construction as both a physical act and a way of thinking. Bringing together artists whose practices move fluidly between painting, sculpture, and object-making, the exhibition examines how abstraction is shaped not only through image, but through the material decisions that give an artwork its form. Support, surface, volume, weight, and structure are not secondary to the work—they are its vocabulary.

Many of the artists in the exhibition begin where painting has traditionally ended. Canvas is cut, folded, woven, or stitched back together. Pigment becomes sediment or relief. Wood, plaster, fabric, metal, and found materials operate as both support and subject, collapsing distinctions between what carries an image and what constitutes it. Rather than concealing the mechanics of construction, these works allow them to remain visible, making the logic of their assembly an essential part of their meaning.

Throughout the exhibition, building is understood as an accumulative process of revision rather than a linear progression toward completion. Gestures are interrupted, surfaces are excavated, forms are dismantled and rebuilt. The resulting works hold evidence of their own making, revealing abstraction as something continually negotiated between intuition and intention, control and contingency. Material becomes a record of thought, and process becomes inseparable from perception.

Although the artists work across a wide range of media and generations, they share an attention to the intelligence of materials and to the ways objects occupy space. Some emphasize density and mass, while others pursue lightness, permeability, or fragility. Together, they suggest that abstraction is less a fixed visual language than an evolving conversation between hand, material, and structure—a conversation that continues beyond the studio and into the viewer’s experience.

Builders brings together works by 30 artists whose works propose that construction is never simply a means of producing an object; it is a way of understanding how images, materials, and ideas come into being. In each case, the act of building remains present, inviting viewers to encounter the artwork not as a finished statement, but as an active site of inquiry.