Installation view of Recent Work by Asher Liftin

Installation view, Asher Liftin: Recent Work, Sep 18 – Nov 7, 2026, 125 Newbury, New York © Asher Liftin

Asher Liftin

Recent Work

On View
Sep 18 – Nov 7, 2026
New York
 
 
125 Newbury presents Asher Liftin: Recent Work, an exhibition of new paintings and drawings by the Brooklyn-based artist on view from September 18 through November 7 at 395 Broadway in Tribeca. Following Liftin’s Summer 2026 Artist Residency at The Watermill Center in Watermill, New York, the exhibition is curated by Arne Glimcher and accompanied by a written introduction by Glimcher in the gallery’s 125 Free Press publication.

Asher Liftin’s work investigates fundamental conditions of vision and visibility. Using his own photography as source material, he translates mechanical images refracted in a glass eye into meticulously hand-crafted renderings on canvas and paper. The resulting images both evoke and extend histories of pointillism and divisionism, summoning the tradition of painters from Paul Signac to Chuck Close. As in the art of Close, Liftin decomposes photographs into their constituent colors, dividing them into four hues—cyan, yellow, magenta, and black—in much the same way a modern color printer produces the full spectrum of visible chroma.

Yet Liftin’s paintings are anything but printed. Instead, they are emphatically handmade. Often, the mysterious matrix of lines and dots from which his images emerge appear almost woven. Liftin begins such paintings by putting down a medium-gray ground, onto which he carefully deposits layers of acrylic ink. He overlays successive lines of ink into grids, before breaking them down into multicolored dots, producing shifts in value across the canvas. The resulting paintings sit on the border between the human and the mechanical—the dots and lines dripping and trembling, revealing the organic hand that made them. This effect can be varied depending on the particular inks and viscosities that Liftin uses in a given composition. In Glass Pane, watered-down India ink softly dissolves in layers resembling watercolor. In Brooklyn Bridge, Liftin uses vibrant, viscous acrylics to produce stark contrasts in tone and hue.

Holding bachelor’s degrees in both Art and Cognitive Science from Yale (2021), Liftin’s practice is deeply rooted in the intersection between image-making and image-processing. At a distance, his paintings lock into place with near photographic clarity. At close range, they unravel, becoming luminous networks of colored markings that attest to the process of their own creation. This push-and-pull between the completeness and finality of the image, on the one hand, and the fragmentation of its making, on the other, is a constant. Liftin’s paintings produce this in a continuous cycle of resolve and dissolve, which changes according to the viewer’s physical relationship to the picture plane. In this way, Liftin’s works are simultaneously realist depictions and maps of our own cognition.

As the art historian Carol Armstrong has noted, Liftin’s work functions “in much the same way that our eyes, in concert with our brains, construct a recognizable image, from the ground-up, out of bits of raw perceptual data: something that is going on all the time without our being in the least aware of it.” Through this alchemical yet deeply methodical approach to image-making, Liftin harnesses this perceptual process toward his own painterly ends. The very facture of the resulting paintings and drawings encapsulates the essence of the process of seeing. Liftin’s paintings and works on paper therefore do not so much make the world visible, as they reveal the hidden processes that underlie the very possibility of seeing.

 
Carnegie Hall by Asher Liftin

Asher Liftin, Carnegie Hall (detail), 2026 © Asher Liftin

Essays

Asher Liftin: Weaving into Painting

By Arne Glimcher

In my life, I am often inundated with people asking me to visit the studios of their artist friends. Usually, I agree, not expecting any­thing to come of it. I've always liked visiting artist studios. It keeps my humility intact.

My assistant, Dylan Siegel, had been telling me that I abso­lutely must visit the studio of a friend of his, a young painter. I had little interest in the proposition, but as I valued Dylan, his dedica­tion, and hard work in my office, what could I do but agree?

After some weeks or months, I am finally on my way to the studio of the young Asher Liftin. Traffic is proving horrific. I am stuck bumper-to-bumper, trying to turn onto Park Avenue, where Liftin’s studio is located. (This is the other Park Avenue, the one in Brooklyn.) The car comes to a complete stop in a busy area at the center of a Hasidic community. Little kids in all black swarm around the car, streaming by. It's like I've been transported to an­other time and place.

I arrive at the studio, ring the bell, and wait. Suddenly, a sprightly creature appears at the door. He bears a striking re­semblance to Peter Pan. Could that be him, I wonder? He has a certain sparkle, the youthful mien of a teenager. He seems abuzz with the energy of a hummingbird. Arriving in this strange place and meeting this very particular person has already been payoff for the trip, I think to myself.

Walking together down the hall of Asher’s industrial building, I can feel my skepticism. Dylan had shown me photos of his ear­lier paintings, which were admittedly impressive in technique. Somehow, though, they hadn’t reached me. Perhaps it was the representational imagery. Aside from the work of Chuck Close, Robert Longo, Kiki Smith, and a handful of other geniuses, I am more often drawn to abstraction.

Stepping into Asher’s studio, I find myself immediately daz­zled. At first, I think the paintings are tapestries. I decide very quickly they must actually be photographs. Finally, though, I can see that they really are paintings. Closer observation reveals the remarkable way he constructs an image, how he builds it like Seurat, from iterations of incremental lines woven together. In transparent hues of red, yellow, blue, and black, interwoven lines come together perceptually to form the image. But they also fracture and unwind at the edges of the picture, or drip down from their place in the midst of it, dissolving the grid and testify­ing to the handmade nature of the object. When the lines break, light streams in, turning background into foreground and revers­ing the picture plane’s logic.

I know now I am having an encounter with something new, something that deals with the fundamental problem of picture­making. Though the images are sometimes seductive, they are more often incredibly simple. A portrait of a friend. A still life of a glass of water on the table. Cars in a parking lot. Often, like the image out of a car window looking through the blurred trusses of the Brooklyn Bridge, they have an almost mysterious quality, a sense of a secret hidden between the stitching.

Like Chuck Close, the paintings of Asher Liftin emerge from an accumulation of iterative marks—lines and dots—in shades of blue, yellow, red, and black, with which he renders an almost photographic image in full color. Yet, as one gazes at the paint­ings, the image seems to fade, shifting to black-and-white and back again. As the yarn of Liftin’s marks changes thickness, coming almost to a breaking point, the space between the marks enters the image, suffusing it with light and bleaching the pal­ette. The paintings suddenly seem filtered, shifted into pastel tones or shaded in a minor key. Color becomes furtive, sifted through vision and slipping away. In certain zones of the paint­ing, light appears so strong as to dissolve the foreground com­pletely, giving the image the pallor of a faded photograph. Blink, however, and it snaps right back to full color.

In another work of Liftin’s, a drawing, he depicts two flickering candles side by side. Where he renders the flame’s brightest point, the marks seem almost to consume the page. The image burns itself, eats itself away. You can sense in this and other works Liftin’s love of Richter.

Standing in the studio, I realize these paintings must have been incredibly tedious to produce. The process reminds me so much of Close. Liftin has discovered a totally new way to find beauty within realism, just as Close did, but all his own. The mag­ic is in the method. His process of breaking down the image­drawing from his own photographs, from snapshots on his phone-only to recompose and reweave it in light as a painting. In this accumulated tapestry of marks, Liftin’s images feel heav­ily laden with the time he spends making them. Yet they also feel diffused, airy, filled with lightness, as if the image were on the verge of disappearing into the ether.

On the drive back to Manhattan, I experience a sense of ela­tion, which for me is rare. I was not expecting this today. I think back to my skepticism about the trip. I smile when I think of Dylan and his young painter friend. There are still discoveries waiting to be made.

Brooklyn Bridge by Asher Liftin

Asher Liftin, Brooklyn Bridge (detail), 2026 © Asher Liftin

Essays

Seeing through a Screen: Asher Liftin

By C.M. Armstrong

He begins a painting with a canvas prepared with a medium-grey ground: neither the dark ground of old-style chiaroscural paint­ing, nor the light ground of Impressionist "peinture claire," but something in-between. He proceeds by projecting a digital pho­tograph onto that prepared surface, blocking out its main forms and, crucially, the highlights on those forms, in white acrylic, be­fore adding in dark tones that—together with the white pigment and grey ground—give the under-painting the look of a black ­and-white photograph translated into paint. And then he layers over that foundation a painterly kind of rasterized dot-matrix, in successive strata of colored, water-based inks, carefully pre­pared on his palette to follow the CMYK (Cyan/ Magenta/Yellow/ Key) subtractive system of color-mixing. Together those pixelat­ed strata construct the image—a still life, say, of a single flower in a simple glass vase—in much the same way that our eyes, in con­cert with our brains, construct a recognizable image, from the ground-up, out of bits of raw perceptual data: something that is going on all the time without our being in the least aware of it. Simultaneously, the highlights that undergird that colored dot­ matrix-instead of sitting on top as they generally do in the history of illusionist painting-filter and flicker through to give the image, the flower in the glass vase, its optical sparkle, mimicking the additive RGB (Red/Green/Blue) system of the light spectrum, as received by the three types of light receptor cones in the hu­man eye, before being processed in and through the somatic ac­tivity of the brain.

Studio and gallery windows, printed and painted, larger and smaller, which call to mind both the mod­ernist grid and the Italian Renaissance model of the picture-as­-window, an opening onto the world on the other side of its no­tionally transparent surface.

C.M. Armstrong

As the painting’s viewers, in turn, we see that flower in the glass vase as if through a screen: a window screen, a computer screen, a silkscreen or a half-tone screen—really, any or all of these screens are pertinent here. And we start by taking that screened image in from a distance that allows us to see, recog­nize and understand it as a whole gestalt, processing it from the top down, before moving up close to encounter the rainbow net­works of colored and sometimes gridded dots of which its sur­face is composed, at which point the gestalt of the flower in the vase partially unravels and undoes itself, to become an exercise in pointillist abstraction. That raveling and unraveling are com­plementary and continuous in the dance between painter and viewer that each of Asher Liftin’s paintings proposes.

From a distance, as if seen through a screen, the canna lily in its squat, round glass vase is a cool painting, as are all of this young artist’s paintings, when seen at a glance or in photograph­ic reproduction. But as we move progressively closer in to its surface, it gathers warmth, not only from the coloristic pleasures of its overlapping cyans and magentas and yellows—which com­bine to produce greens and pinks, oranges and purples, inter­laced with blacks—but also from the ever-more evident facture of the painting, in particular the drips that stream down from some of its details. Those drips, together with the woven, textile­-like look of the ink-painted surface, help sustain the unraveling effect that marks these paintings as well: one small colored-pen­cil drawing of a lit candle metaphorizes that effect quite directly, with a bottom edge that appears to fray, as if each colored line that makes up the mesh of the image were a separate colored thread, coming apart from the lattice-work warp and weft of its weave. It is at this level that the paintings, too, confront their in­termedial constructedness: their fundamental movement be­tween the image-systems of painting, digital photography, print­ing, drawing-all of which are practiced by Liftin—as they are tapestried together like a loomed piece of Jacquard fabric, yield­ed from a protocomputer code. (The textilic basis of painting on canvas surfaces everywhere, across media, in this body of work.)

The subjects that Liftin chooses to paint, print and draw, along with the manner in which they are rendered, are mediat­ed—screened, we might say-through an array of art-historical reference. First, still life-flower painting, in particular-reminis­cent, for me at least, of Edouard Manet’s poignantly simple “last flowers.∏ (There is also a lovely little drawing of lemons that re­minds me irresistibly of Manet’s own late lemon and other single and double pieces of fruit.) Studio and gallery windows, printed and painted, larger and smaller, which call to mind both the mod­ernist grid and the Italian Renaissance model of the picture-as­-window, an opening onto the world on the other side of its no­tionally transparent surface. Small colored-pencil drawings of a female intimate, at once clearly posed and snapshot-like: these portraits evoke the photofiltered paintings of Gerhard Richter, as does the topic of the lit candle found in certain drawings and paintings, such as the one mentioned above. Mannerist bathers, culled randomly, by means of a self-censoring prompt given to an Al program, from 17th-century Italian sources such as the work of the so-called “II Passignano.” Collaged and swirled paint­ings that vaguely recall Picasso and Van Gogh. The illusionist gambits of 20th-century Photorealism and of earlier camera ob­scura painters such as Johannes Vermeer. And through it all, of course, runs the Neo-lmpressionist mark of Georges Seurat, and the divisionist color theory that goes with it. Though it is possible to see Liftin’s paintings as connecting the dots between Vermeer and Richter, however, this screening through the sieve of art his­tory does not really yield any secure time-line; quite the contrary. But it does knit together the threads of a mediated vision, in which the image bank of painting and its sister media is imbri­cated with cognitive process. Asher Liftin is not a neuroscientist, and this is not “neuro-art-history,” but his is a practice that ev­erywhere invokes the intersection between art and cognition.

I have always had a special taste for still-life painting, so I am drawn to those works in particular. One little doubled painting of flowers in a vase—on the left side a Photorealist oil version of it, and abutting it on the right side a flipped version of the same im­age, rendered in an enlarged raster of inked dots—opens onto broader questions of mirroring and cognitive mediation, scaling and iteration. And so, though it is not in the present exhibition, I shall conclude by zeroing in on a slightly earlier pair of paintings that resides in Liftin’s studio, for that pair quite literally doubles down on the same operation of doubling in order to confront those questions with magisterial, even preternatural confidence. Much larger in scale, this pair of paintings of tulips in a vase set against a view out a window, each reflected upside-down in the surface of a glass coffee table with books on it, flips the left-right orientation of the smaller still-life pair, so that now the rasterized, inked canvas sits on the left, hinged to the reversed, Photorealist oil version of itself on the right. This time the rasterized half on the left is composed of a tighter fabric of much smaller pixelation, so that the importance of scale and resolution become pro­nounced, especially relative to the smaller, more recent pair of flower paintings just mentioned: the smaller the painting the larger and more noticeable the raster, and the closer one is in­vited to get to the image’s surface and its mediation by and through its weave of dots, while the larger the painting and the smaller the raster, the more one is inclined to back up and see it as a resolved image. And vice versa on both counts.

But in the case of the larger pair of paintings that scalar dimension, along with the doubling and reversal of the image, the undermining of its own transparency, its translation of digital photograph into paint, and its pairing of printerly ink and paint­erly oil, is tied to a more complex meditation on mirroring. The still life’s setting against the backdrop of a window is pertinent here, as is the pile of books (with at least one semi-readable title on its spine); the mirror-image of the artist with camera repro­duced twice on the convex side of the vase and twice reflected upside-down on the glass table (mimicking a device found in 17th-century Dutch still-life painting); the broad areas of white paint on that table in the right-side version; the blurry white “cir­cles of confusion” on the cushions in the right-side background (subtly reminiscent of Vermeer’s work); and the little square painting-within-a-doubled painting that is purposefully propped against the couch and the window in the back.

Together these add up to a kind of self-reflexive summa of Asher Liftin’s iterative experimentation with the relay between painting and cognition: suggesting not only the intersection be­tween bottom-up and top-down mental processing, but also the doubling of stereoscopic vision, the upside-downness of the ret­inal image before it is righted by the brain, not to mention the necessity of repetition in the process of learning to see. And through it all runs the history of Western picturing, screened through the colored materiality of painterly and printerly pig­ment. Back up from the surface, and ta-da!, it comes into focus. Move in close, and it comes undone. Move away once more and it all comes back together. But move from side to side in front of this joined pair of paintings, and you see it do both, in concert and in oscillating alternation, over and over again.

 

Checklist

Asher Liftin,
Brooklyn Bridge,
2026
2026, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on linen, 86" × 66" (218.4 cm × 167.6 cm)
Asher Liftin,
Lilies,
2026
2026, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on linen, 86" × 66" (218.4 cm × 167.6 cm)
Asher Liftin,
Glass of Water,
2026
2026, colored pencil on paper, 20" × 16-1/2" (50.8 cm × 41.9 cm), framed
Asher Liftin,
Glass Pane,
2026
2026, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on linen, 86" × 66" (218.4 cm × 167.6 cm)
Asher Liftin,
Yellow House,
2026
2026, colored pencil on paper, 18-1/2" × 15-1/2" (47 cm × 39.4 cm), framed
Asher Liftin,
Parking Lot,
2026
2026, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on linen, 86" × 66" (218.4 cm × 167.6 cm)
Asher Liftin,
Museum Guard,
2026
2026, colored pencil on paper, 18-1/8" × 15-3/16" (46 cm × 38.6 cm), framed
Asher Liftin,
Mikhail Baryshnikov,
2026
2026, colored pencil on paper, 19" × 16" (48.3 cm × 40.6 cm), framed
Asher Liftin,
Silver,
2026
2026, colored pencil on paper, 19-11/16" × 16-3/16" (50 cm × 41.1 cm), framed
Asher Liftin,
Metro-North,
2026
2026, colored pencil on paper, 18" × 15-5/8" (45.7 cm × 39.7 cm), framed
Asher Liftin,
Ariadne,
2026
2026, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on linen, 79" × 59" (200.7 cm × 149.9 cm)
Asher Liftin,
Oranges,
2026
2026, colored pencil on paper, 16" × 15-1/2" (40.6 cm × 39.4 cm), paper
Asher Liftin,
Glass of Water,
2025
2025, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on linen, 79" × 59" (200.7 cm × 149.9 cm)
Asher Liftin,
Carnegie Hall,
2026
2026, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on linen, 79" × 59" (200.7 cm × 149.9 cm)
Asher Liftin,
Two Candles,
2026
2026, colored pencil on paper, 18-1/4" × 15-1/2" (46.4 cm × 39.4 cm), framed
Asher Liftin,
New York Window,
2024
2024, acrylic ink and acrylic paint on linen, 79" × 59" (200.7 cm × 149.9 cm)
 
Portrait of Asher Liftin

Photo: Dylan Siegel

About the Artist

Asher Liftin lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Liftin received a BA in Visual Art and a BS in Cognitive Science from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut in 2021, and was the Summer 2026 Artist-in-Residence at the Watermill Center in Watermill, New York. His first solo exhibition, Blow Up, was held in 2022 at Alessandro Albanese, Milan. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at Nino Mier Gallery in New York (2023 and 2026) and Brussels (2024). His work has been included in several group exhibitions, including at Chili Art Projects, London (2025), Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2024), Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York (2024), Winter Street Gallery, Edgartown, Massachusetts (2023, 2024), and M+B, Los Angeles (2023). Works by Liftin are held in the permanent collections of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.

 
EXHIBITION DETAILS

Asher Liftin Recent Work
Sep 18 – Nov 7, 2026

GALLERY

125 Newbury
395 Broadway
New York