Overview
Alex Carver returns to Miguel Abreu Gallery with The Knot, a 12-painting exhibition that reaffirms the Boise-based artist's commitment to technical innovation and conceptual depth. Running through May 9, 2026, at the gallery's Lower East Side location, this third solo presentation showcases Carver's distinctive approach to painting as an intersection of material process, anatomical inquiry, and spatial abstraction.
The Artist
Carver (b. 1984) brings impressive credentials to this exhibition: an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Cooper Union, with a track record of exhibitions at prestigious institutions including Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin. His previous shows with Miguel Abreu Gallery—External Fixation (2019) and Engineer Sacrifice (2022)—established him as a painter unafraid to interrogate the relationship between surface, depth, and representation.
Key Works to Look For
The paintings in The Knot emerge from Carver's unconventional production method: he first creates low-relief, frieze-like sculptures, positions them behind unstretched canvas, then uses large plaster knives to transfer oil paint across the surface. This frottage technique generates indexical traces that evoke CT scans, X-rays, and ultrasound imagery without literalizing them—a crucial distinction that elevates the work beyond mere illustration into something more visually complex.
The knot itself operates on multiple registers throughout the exhibition. It appears as a discrete visual icon, a compositional principle, and a conceptual framework exploring contradictions: the knot both entangles and clarifies, both convokes and binds. Carver draws source material from early anatomical studies, medical imaging of a fallen climber, and Wound Man, a medieval medical icon that haunts the Western imagination.
Central to the work is how figure and ground, traditionally binary coordinates in painting, dissolve into the "undulating membrane of visual information" that exists between them. Here lies the exhibition's formal innovation: Carver privileges everything between representation and abstraction, creating painterly surfaces that vibrate with ecstatic possibility.
Why It Matters
The Knot arrives at a moment when painting continues grappling with its relationship to technology and the body. Carver's work refuses easy resolution. By incorporating biomedical imagery—itself a technology of visualization—he doesn't instrumentalize painting as a vehicle for scanning or documenting. Instead, he demonstrates how painting's haptic, material processes can coexist with and complicate our relationship to medical representation.
The exhibition also challenges traditional phenomenological readings of painting. The knot, that eternal symbol of entanglement and connection, becomes a vehicle for exploring how surfaces dissolve, how boundaries blur, and how figure and ground might be reconceived as coordinates within a more complex field of visual experience rather than as opposing forces.
For viewers, The Knot offers a profound meditation on painting's enduring capacity to surprise—to move beyond its supposed exhaustion into territories where material process, conceptual rigor, and visual ecstasy intersect.
Visitor Info
Exhibition Dates: March 12 – May 9, 2026
Location: Miguel Abreu Gallery, 88 Eldridge Street, New York
Gallery Information: miguelabreugallery.com
The exhibition is essential viewing for anyone interested in contemporary painting's continued vitality and formal innovation.