Exhibits & Events

Wexler Gallery is pleased to present Pentimento, the debut solo exhibition of New York-based artist Danny Balgley. The exhibition brings together a vibrant body of new paintings and works on paper that explore the interplay between intuitive mark-making, structural layering, and the physical accumulation of a painting's history.

A reception with the artist will be held on Saturday, September 19, from 2:00 to 4:00 PM.

Balgley's paintings emerge from a sustained engagement with pentimento, an Italian word meaning "repentance," that in painting refers to the visible emergence of earlier images or marks beneath subsequent layers. Equally informed by surfaces shaped by time, erosion, and historied patina, his compositions develop through a dual methodology of application and excavation. Dense layers of paint are applied, obscured, scraped away, and exhumed, transforming each canvas into a visual record of layered gestures where earlier decisions remain visible, informing the work's final state. Through this process of trace archaeology, the painting becomes both image and artifact, preserving evidence of its own evolution.

In these latest works, Balgley embraces vivid and often unexpected color relationships, allowing saturated hues to emerge through translucent veils and abraded passages of paint. Ghostly forms drift across the surface, dissolving conventional distinctions between foreground and background. Exaggerated gestures, at times recalling the visual immediacy of Pop Art, animate the picture plane with an energetic rhythm while maintaining the contemplative depth that has long characterized his work. The result is a dynamic tension between spontaneity and restraint, presence and disappearance, creating paintings that continuously shift as they are viewed.

Pentimento marks Balgley's first solo exhibition with Wexler Gallery and reflects the gallery's continued commitment to artists whose practices challenge traditional distinctions between process and object, intuition and structure, and material and meaning.