Jane Dickson’s New York After Dark at Karma

Jane Dickson‘s exhibition Promised Land (9 September–28 October 2023) is one of the top gallery shows to visit in New York this month. It takes place across Karma‘s 188 and 172 East 2nd Street galleries.

Dickson’s first show with the gallery features new paintings and drawings emblazoned with text and signage of New York after hours.

Walking around the city she has called home for 40 years, Dickson photographs strip clubs, suburban homes, late-night bars, and luminescent street signs to form the basis of her paintings.

Cinematic in appearance, the material range of these works—some oil stick on linen, some acrylic on canvas, others acrylic on felt—is the biggest joy. While the fuzziness of the oil stick on linen captures the haziness of nightlife scenes as seen in Universal Unisex (2023), the way the acrylic clags into the felt in works such as Bargain (2023) creates a strong luminosity that shines through the canvas.

‘Although Jane came to prominence alongside artists such as David Hammons, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Jenny Holzer, I would say, at least canonically, her work is more in the lineage of [Edward] Hopper or [George] Bellows,’ says Karma founder and publisher Brendan Dugan.

He continues, ‘Like them, she’s a painter attuned to an ever-present sense of loneliness in modern life.’

Main image: Jane Dickson, Universal Unisex (2023). Oil stick on linen. 137.8 x 183.2 cm. Courtesy Karma.