EXCERPT, was a group show opening at the gallery’s NYC location at 39 Henry St. on Wednesday, January 14, 2026, including work by Andy Graydon, Christina Ballantyne, Dahn Gim, Emma Beatrez, Erin Smith, Ish Lipman, Julia García, Lindsay Rhyner, and Rachel Collier.
2025 was a year of exciting growth for the HAIR+NAILS gallery program that has been operating since 2016 in Minneapolis and since 2024 in NYC. In addition to a full year of programming in our second space in NYC’s Lower East Side, the gallery presented at five fairs including Felix LA, NADA NY, Door County Contemporary, Untitled Houston, and Untitled Miami Beach. EXCERPT — the first show of 2026 — celebrates highlights of the past year’s programming with select paintings and sculptures that have not yet been seen in NYC. We love every single piece in this show, and we love how the new array gives each new context; new conversations emerge, we see everything in a new light.

Drawing from our two-person presentation at Untitled Art Houston last fall are paintings by Los Angeles- based artists Christina Ballantyne and Ish Lipman. Ballantyne’s fierce and haunting Cherry Looking Upwards, a study in an underworld of red ascending into blue and yellow tones, reveals a complex surrealist tableau of subconscious unease. Unsettling figuration emerges from blurry abstraction. Lipman’s cool blue landscape Ocean Pathway offers the perfect counterpoint in both palette and vibe. There is a peacefulness and meditative quality to the scene with a visceral existential loneliness that gives the work a real bite.
Free Verse (2008/2025) draws from Andy Graydon’s tour-de-force solo exhibition Early Reflections at HAIR+NAILS MPLS last fall. Free Verse is a work for burnt out fluorescent tubes and video projection. Reviewing the show in SixtyInchesFromCenter, Amanda Hamilton writes “Though it’s clear how it’s technically done, this immaterial projection passing into the frosted tubes is compelling they stand silently, taking the light in, more metaphysical than scientific.”

Rarely seen out of Minneapolis, local legend Lindsay Rhyner’s large-scale textile collages are a wonder of relentless details. Her Black Plate Club is a gorgeous composition, pairing fabric the artist hand-marbled to resemble swirly weather maps with found fabric (sushi socks!) Japanese meal impersonations. It was a hit of the gallery’s Felix LA 2025 presentation.

Gallery artists Erin Smith and Dahn Gim are reunited here with highlights from their spring 2025 Minneapolis concurrent solo shows (Smith’s ITERATIVE ITERATIVE ITERATIVE and Gim’s NAMES I HAD YOU CALL ME). Erin Smith’s wild ceramic figurative piece Flesh Cornucopia more than lives up to its disturbing moniker. Created during her time at the prestigious Arts/Industry Residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, it feels exactly at the intersection of the classical form and an anxious future yet to manifest. Names I Had You Call Me — Catherine, Dahn’s wall-hanging, leather encased, found car exhaust pipe apparatus is a great example of her uncompromising approach to craft and form.

Rachel Collier’s crayon drawing on yupo paper Fleurs de Nuit is a small but important piece from her ambitious Minneapolis solo show A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING, recently named one of the 10 best shows of the year by MPLSart. We see in this composition Collier’s jagged, effortlessly expressive marks connecting her strong modernist influences to a vital and adventurous materiality that feels truly of the contemporary moment. Keep an eye out for the Rachel Collier/Christina Ballantyne two person show at HAIR+NAILS NYC in April 2026.

Last spring was Julia García’s moment with three concurrent solo presentations at HAIR+NAILS NYC, NADA NY 2025, and HAIR+NAILS MPLS. The painting Flower Moon, from the Minneapolis show UNDER EXCESS SUN, is an exquisite example of García’s signature wet on wet flowing technique in which chance and intention evoke memory, loss, beauty, and disorientation. A commonplace domestic scene becomes much more; we see inside the subject into a radiant and overwhelming unease. This work is paired with García’s new painting, Balcony, a dreamy scene from “in the club” in which violet and dark blues begin to fade into darkness on the edges of a hallucinatory haze.

Emma Beatrez’s ILYSM4EVR comes direct from December’s three-person Minneapolis blockbuster Heavy Hitters. This modified found object sculpture may come as a surprise to those who have mainly seen their paintings. But back home, Beatrez is well known as a prolific and adventurous sculptor and installation artist. The reaper’s favorite tool enhanced with an etched memo stirs the timeless theme of love and death.