SHARILYN NEIDHARDT

October 24th - November 21st, 2026

“In JUST LOOKING, the paintings refuse almost all depth. The surfaces are stubbornly flat, the light is even, and the figures—drawn with the blunt clarity of graphic signage—occupy a shallow, unapologetic plane. There is little shadow, little modeling, almost no atmospheric apology. I have tried to look at each person as plainly as I can bear, stripping away the usual painterly evasions. These are not inventions; every face belongs to someone I have stood near, watched, and recorded with a kind of deliberate, journalistic restraint.

The subject of the work is looking itself. Each painting depicts a real individual in the act of experiencing art. When you stand in front of one of these portraits, you complete a quiet loop: you are now looking at someone who was looking at art, while you, too, look at art. The gaze folds back on itself. The word “voyeur” begins to migrate. It slips from the painted figure to the viewer in the gallery, and perhaps lingers longest on me—the painter who watched the watchers, who chose whom to watch, who decided how plainly to show them.

We are living in 2026, a year that feels both over-exposed and opaque. Power ricochets without pattern; certainty has been replaced by competing fictions. In such a climate, ambiguity can feel like a luxury we can no longer afford. These paintings are my refusal to equivocate. They insist on direct address: here is a person, here is their attention, here is what they chose to look at. No haze, no metaphor thick enough to hide behind.

I still believe art is the clearest instrument we have. It records what matters when everything else is noise. It preserves the fragile fact of shared looking—of one consciousness briefly meeting another across a canvas or a room. Art connects what propaganda tries to sever. Art remembers what disinformation wants forgotten. Art has saved the world before, and it is the only thing I trust to do it again.

So keep looking. Look hard. Look without flinching. That act—simple, stubborn, repeated—is how we stay human.”

BIO:

Sharilyn Neidhardt is a Brooklyn-based visual artist. She blends her experiences as a photojournalist and as a paintmaker into her work depicting experiences of urban life. She was a core member of glowlab and created the Human Scale Chess Game which was played in several North American cities. With artist Sal Randolph, Ms Neidhardt toured in the musical act Weapons of Mass Destruction, for which she composed several songs. Sharilyn is a co-founder of the artists' community trans-cen-der, which meets monthly in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared on Drawing New York and ArtSpiel. She’s an avid cyclist, loves midnight movies, and speaks only a little German.