Interviews by Brainard Carey

Caitlin Keogh (b. 1982 in Anchorage, Alaska) lives and works in New York. Her work has recently been included in group shows at Fondation Carmignac, Porquerolles, France, and The Church, Sag Harbor, NY. Keogh has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Melas Papadopoulos, Athens, Greece; and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY. In 2021, Keogh completed a mural in the city of Holbaek, Denmark in conjunction with Holbaek Art, and in 2019, she participated in Art Basel Parcours, Basel, Switzerland. Her work has also been exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; MoMA Warsaw, Poland; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany; the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and the Queens Museum, Flushing Meadows, NY.

Her work is represented in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Amorepacific Museum of Art, Seoul; the Rollins Museum of Art, Winter Park, Florida; and the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Providence.

Caitlin Keogh 07.10.25, 2025 Colored pencil on paper mounted on panel 16 3/8 x 11 5/8 x 3/4 in (41.5 x 29.5 x 2 cm)
Caitlin Keogh Beige Matrix, Woman With Opera Glasses, 2026 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 96 in (183 x 244 cm)
Caitlin Keogh Ultramarine Matrix, La Fornarina, 2026 Acrylic on panel, postcard 23 1/4 x 13 in (59.1 x 33 cm)

Peter Acheson was born in Washington, DC, in 1954 and received his BFA from Yale University in 1976. An early member of Williamsburg’s art scene in the 1980s, he relocated to upstate New York in the 1990s, where he continues to live and work in Columbia County.

His paintings range from textured abstractions to restrained gestures that draw on a wide range of influences, including nineteenth-century French painting, Blinky Palermo, Raoul De Keyser, Bill Jensen, and Forrest Bess, alongside close observation of the landscape surrounding his studio.

Acheson’s concern is less with resolving these references than it is to allow them to coexist, permitting his paintings to act as habitats where various traditions and approaches can meet without hierarchy. This carries through to Acheson’s playful way of treating his compositions, leaving them caught between styles, simultaneously structured and chaotic, with direct references and happenstance similarity.

His work has been exhibited at Anton Kern Gallery, New York; Steven Harvey Fine Arts, New York; Gordon Robichaux, New York; Brennan & Griffin, New York; Novella Gallery, New York; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York; the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York; Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York; and Baumgartner Gallery, New York. His work has been discussed in Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail.

Peter Acheson Four Levels, 1983 – 1984 Oil on wood 8 7/8 x 11 1/8 inches (22.5 x 28.1 cm) Photography Izzy Leung, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery
Peter Acheson Untitled, 2020 Oil and stick on wood block 2 x 6 1/4 x 1 3/4 inches (5.1 x 15.9 x 4.4 cm) Photography Izzy Leung, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery
Peter Acheson Untitled, 2010-2012 Oil on wood 10 1/4 x 6 3/8 inches (26 x 16.2 cm). Photography Izzy Leung, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery
Peter Acheson Untitled, 2019 Oil on canvas 16 x 20 inches (40.6 x 50.8 cm) Photography Izzy Leung, Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery

Yuya Saito (b. 1982, Japan) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He makes wall-based works and freestanding sculpture in laminated and bent wood, a language he has developed over more than a decade out of the craft of bent-wood furniture-making.

Saito’s work has been presented internationally at such institutions and venues as Rockefeller Center, New York; Brooklyn Army Terminal, New York; National Art Center, Tokyo; and Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo.

Public commissions include installations for the Brooklyn Army Terminal, New York (2026) and Art Link at Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse (2022). He is the recipient of the TRiCERA Award and Jury Award at IAG Awards 2021, as well as the Special Jury Award at Independent Tokyo 2020.

Yuya Saito, Ground Rules, Installation View
Yuya Saito, Ground Rules, Installation View
Yuya Saito, Ground Rules, Installation View

Portrait of Shaun Leonardo, 2024. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
Shaun Leonardo (b. 1979, Queens, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work negotiates societal expectations of manhood, namely definitions surrounding Black and brown masculinities, along with its notions of achievement, collective identity, and experience of failure. Leonardo received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and has received support from Creative Capital, Guggenheim Social Practice, Art for Justice, and A Blade of Grass. His work is currently included in the traveling group exhibition Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, open now at the Perez Art Museum Miami.

Leonardo’s work has also been featured at the Guggenheim Museum, the Norton Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Queens Museum, the High Line, and the New Museum, and profiled in The New York Times, Artnet News, and CNN. His solo exhibition, The Breath of Empty Space, was presented at MICA, MASS MoCA, and The Bronx Museum, and his first major public art commission, Between Four Freedoms, premiered at Four Freedoms Park Conservancy in 2021. Numerous institutions hold Leonardo’s work in their collections, including the Bowdoin Museum of Art, the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Art Collection, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, El Museo del Barrio, the Portland Museum of Art, the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Shaun Leonardo, Self-Portrait Icon (Sculpture), 2007. Marble. 24 x 6 x 24 inches (61 x 15.2 x 61 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
Shaun Leonardo, Self-Portrait Superhero 4 (Sleeping Giant), 2008. Sign enamel on plywood cutout. 48 x 70 x 3/4 inches (121.9 x 177.8 x 1.9 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.
Shaun Leonardo, Champ (Mike Tyson), 2014. Charcoal on paper. 76 1/8 x 64 inches (193.4 x 162.6 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York.

Izzy Barber (b. 1990) is originally from Gowanus, Brooklyn, and lives and works in Queens, New York. Barber paints from life: immediacy and physical presence are at the heart of her practice. Working on-site, in public, often at sunset and into the last light of day and night, her highly impressionistic, at times three-dimensional brushwork charges her paintings with the physical and temporal proximity of their making.

Barber earned her MFA from the New York Studio School in 2017 and her BA in Studio Arts & Human Rights from Bard College in 2011. Her exhibition Badlands (2026, Pièce Unique, Massimo De Carlo, Paris) follows her solo exhibitions There Is No Time (2024, James Fuentes, Los Angeles), Waiting Game (2023, Studio d’Arte Raffaelli, Trento), Crude Futures (2022), and Maspeth Moon (2021) (both at James Fuentes, New York). Her work has been shown at James Fuentes, New York; Massimo De Carlo, Milan; Galleria Franco Noero, Turin; David Zwirner Platform; the New Orleans Arts Center; and the 2012 Brucennial, among other venues. She is a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant. Publications include Waiting Game (2023) and JFP03: Izzy Barber (2021).

Charles Moffett is pleased to present Clay Pigeons, New York-based artist Izzy Barber’s first exhibition with the gallery, organized in collaboration with James Fuentes.

In an era defined by speed and digital reproduction, Barber remains committed to observation, material experimentation, and the visceral experience of painting from life.

The new body of work includes paintings the artist made during three month-long cross-country road trips taken in 2025 and 2026. Working at the extremities of plein-air painting, Barber placed herself in unfamiliar and, at times, charged environments, allowing direct experience and the inherent limitations of her distinctive practice to shape her work. Her resulting paintings unearth the latent tensions stretching across the empty highways, border walls, and deserts of the United States.

Motivated by a relentless drive for exploration, Barber paints with the heightened visual clarity and charged excitement that come from her physical presence with her subject matter. Working on-site in public spaces, she captures compositions swiftly, painting wet-on-wet and infusing her paintings with a luminous quality, often punctuated by vivid flashes of color. Loose, gestural brushwork and a sensitive rendering of light and shadow combine with moments of sharp structure. Barber’s aim is never the precise replication of the scene before her, but rather to create paintings that capture and distill the full sensory experience of a place as she feels it.

As 2025 began, Barber recognized a profound sense of disconnection from the country, isolated in New York City and consuming news largely alone while staring into a private screen. Out of a need to physically confront our current national reality, Barber went west. The intimately scaled paintings that emerged embody that process of firsthand observation and, when seen together, hold a range of contradictions and complexities that characterize our era. Clear blue skies in Ajo, Arizona, are pierced by the insistent vertical stripes of the U.S.-Mexico border wall. Quiet nights in the rural towns of Cedarville, California, and Bassett, Nebraska, are placed in juxtaposition with paintings of armed National Guard troops on the streets of Washington, D.C.

This exhibition does not provide a simplistic or definitive narrative but instead offers a view of one artist’s unfolding, firsthand, impressionistic record of contemporary American life. Engaging directly with the potent subject of the nation’s immigration system, the paintings in Clay Pigeons expand both backward in time and across geographic locations. Connections emerge between paintings of the historic Japanese internment camp site at Tule Lake, California, the active immigrant detention center in El Paso, Texas, and the immigration court at 26 Federal Plaza in downtown Manhattan. Barber concluded each of her trips by driving back to New York City, at times painting from the passenger seat of a moving vehicle, underscoring the literal ties that connect all of these places.

Izzy Barber, Ajo, AZ (2025), photo: Max Yawney
Izzy Barber, Coronado National Park, US/Mexico (2026) photo: Max Yawney
Izzy Barber, Interstate (2026) photo: Max Yawney