James Walsh, Drawn, 2006. Acrylic on canvas, 28 × 22 inches. Courtesy the artist and the Sam and Adele Golden Gallery.
Over the past several months in New York City, I’ve encountered paintings containing neon lights and umbrella spokes, paintings with horns and chains, paintings made from pool tables, paintings agape with Surrealist silicone orifices, and paintings made from HVAC elements—the latter eluding my understanding but analyzed by my brother, a gas plant operator, with remarkable operational clarity. But the paintings that surprised me most, the paintings I found most challenging to square with my assumptions about what a painting is or could be were those in James Walsh’s Relief in Sight, currently on view at the Sam and Adele Golden Gallery in New Berlin, New York. A characteristic Walsh painting comprises masses of bold and brashly colored paint thickened so densely with acrylic gels, pastes, and mediums that it casts shadows on the surface. Walsh begins by preparing the canvas with a thin stain or wash before adding mounds and dollops of paint that project assertively from the surface. Though sometimes, as in Thanks (2005), Walsh’s brushwork smoothes the transition between surface and texture.
Relief in Sight celebrates two related occasions: the forty-fifth anniversary of Golden Artist Colors and Walsh’s professional and artistic relationship with the company and its founders, which has unfolded in parallel over the same period. In his reflective catalogue essay, Mark Golden, the exhibition’s curator, highlights the artist’s formative experiences at the Syracuse Clay Institute and the Triangle Artists’ Workshop, where Walsh met artists Kenneth Noland, Anthony Caro, and the critic Clement Greenberg, a context that would inform the subsequent trajectory of his painting practice. Golden also stresses the importance of Walsh’s early work with clay and ceramics, the physicality of which, he observes, has continued to inform Walsh’s painting.
— Alex Grimley, Brooklyn Rail
February 1, 2026
