Soft Architectures
March 4, 2026 – August 1, 2026
Soft Architectures: Paper As Structure, Idea & Translation
March 4 – August 1, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 9, 2026, | 5:00–7:30 PM
Bridgette Mayer Gallery is pleased to present Soft Architectures: Paper As Structure, Idea & Translation, a major group exhibition featuring seventeen nationally known and distinguished regional artists working across the expansive field of works on paper. On view from March 1 through August 1, 2026, the exhibition brings together significant voices in contemporary art, offering collectors and art enthusiasts an in-depth exploration of paper as both medium and conceptual framework.
The exhibition includes works by Radcliffe Bailey, Ray Beldner, Mel Bochner, Kwame Braithwaite, Francesco Clemente, Will Cotton, Mitch Epstein, Julie Goldstein, Daniel Heyman, Ime Knoebel, Larry Poons, Jon Poblador, Tim McFarlane, Ryan McGinness, Nigel Sense, Kehinde Wiley, and Douglas Witmer.
Through mixed media painting, photography, silkscreen and woodblock prints, drawing, collage, and pastel, Soft Architectures examines paper not merely as a support, but as structure, surface, and site of translation. The works range from figurative and portrait-based compositions to bold abstractions, layered collages, and conceptual text-based works. Together, they demonstrate the remarkable versatility of paper—its immediacy, fragility, rigor, and enduring relevance within contemporary practice.
Read the full press release here.
Artists
Nigel Sense
Nigel Sense is an Australian artist born in Wollongong, currently residing in Penang. Sense embraces a nomadic ethos, drawing inspiration from American abstract expressionists and 1960s pop artists. His distinctive style, shaped by a passion for travel, has graced solo and group exhibitions in Australia and worldwide, including prestigious events such as the Colombo Art…
Tim McFarlane
Tim McFarlane is a painter based in Philadelphia, PA. His abstract paintings and works on paper examine the fluid and contradictory nature of memory and place as informed by time, with an emphasis on color, multi-layered systems and process. McFarlane’s observations of the visual impact of human activity and his everyday engagement with man-made and…
Jon Poblador
Jon Poblador is a Filipino American contemporary artist and art teacher who has been quietly making art for the past twenty years. He has an MFA degree in painting from the University of Pennsylvania and has modestly exhibited his work in Philadelphia, New York City, Phoenix, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong — where he currently resides…
Ray Beldner
Ray Beldner is a mixed media artist whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and can be found in many public and private collections including the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C., the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Oakland Museum of California, the San Jose Museum of Art, the di Rosa Preserve in Napa,…
Julie Goldstein
Julie Goldstein (b. 1975, Hartford, CT) draws inspiration based on personal experiences that reside in storytelling, humor and whimsical interpretations around motherhood, marriage and everyday life. The stories told are often semi-autobiographical and are inspired by her personal relationships along with lively depictions of women throughout history and in a variety of societies that have…
Jessica Backhaus
Jessica Backhaus was born in Cuxhaven, Germany in 1970 and grew up in her family of artists. At the age of sixteen, she moved to Paris, where she later studied Photography and Visual Communications from 1989-1993. There she met Gisèle Freund in 1992, who became her mentor. In 1995, her passion for photography drew her…
Radcliffe Bailey
Growing up in Atlanta, he frequented the High Museum of Art, where his mother, a schoolteacher, introduced him to artists like James Van Der Zee and Jacob Lawrence. She encouraged his interest in art, giving him pencils and paper for drawing. As an undergraduate student, he found himself pulled toward large, outdoor sculptures and worked…
Will Cotton
Using a refined painterly technique inspired by the Hudson River School and traditional figure painting, Will Cotton paints surrealistic foodscapes and demure female nudes wearing lollipop crowns, lounging in cotton candy, or adorned with cupcake foils. Cotton paints from life, constructing elaborate models using real baked goods and other confectionery, from which he derives the…
Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley (b. 1977, Los Angeles) is an American artist best known for his portraits that render people of color in the traditional settings of Old Master paintings. Wiley’s work brings art history face-to-face with contemporary culture, using the visual rhetoric of the heroic, the powerful, the majestic and the sublime to celebrate Black and…
Douglas Witmer
Douglas Witmer (b. 1971) is an artist based in Philadelphia. He is internationally known within the field of reductive abstract painting. Over a career now spanning three decades, Witmer has steadily pursued what he calls “a personal inquiry” into the materiality of the painted object, refining his processes to a set of consciously chosen, direct…