Pentimento
Pentimento
August 27, 2026 - October 2, 2026
Philadelphia
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.
Born in 1987, Danny Balgley lives and works in New York. Drawing from the legacies of Abstract Expressionism and the expansive lyricism of Color Field painting, he extends the quiet, tonal investigations of his earlier work into a richer, more exuberant exploration of color, movement, and materiality. Rather than concealing the process of making, Pentimento celebrates painting as an act of continual revision contributes to the work's final resonance, forging a distinctly contemporary language rooted in process, perception, and the physicality of paint.
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.
Also on view will be a selection of ceramic works by St. Louis–based artist and designer Daniel Shapiro. Characterized by bold forms, unexpected silhouettes, and a playful sense of movement, Shapiro's work challenges conventional ideas of functional design, blurring the boundaries between furniture, lighting, and sculpture. His expressive, hand-built forms balance humor with formal sophistication, transforming everyday objects into animated, characterful presences.
