*In New York: OPENING THIS WEDNESDAY 6-9pm
HAIR + NAILS NYC
39 Henry St. New York, NY 10002
Rose McBurney — Body Roll
at
HAIR + NAILS NYC
39 Henry St. New York, NY 10002
OPENING RECEPTION: Wednesday, May 13, 2026. 6:00-9:00pm
OPEN GALLERY HOURS: walk-ins welcome: Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays 1:00-6:00 starting May 15 through June 20. Also, appointments can be scheduled 7 days/week via
hairandnailsart@gmail.com.
HAIR+NAILS presents Body Roll, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with New Orleans based artist Rose McBurney. In her first solo show since completing her MFA at Yale, McBurney presents seven new large oil paintings on linen birthed from her experimentation in material, embodied movement, and colored light. The artist will be present at the opening reception Wednesday, May 13, 2026, at HAIR+NAILS NYC, 39 Henry St.
In the artist’s words:
“These paintings were made between December 2025 and April 2026 after a four-month period of studio research involving the staging of abstract installations and a publicly staged tableau vivant. During this period of play, I used light, colored theatre gels, cutout fabric, paper and my body to explore the phenomenology of light, shadow, and shape. I was swept up and energized by the qualia of color: the redness of red, the greenness of green. Through kismet, I was gifted an entire thirty-year collection of theatre gels from a university theatre department. In the crosscurrents of the university’s phase-out from analog tactile plastic sheets to the new digital, the increasing uselessness of this material was exactly what I needed. This windfall of the theatre gel material propelled my practice. I enjoy being off the internet, moving objects around, and working with my body in space. My paintings hold a trace of gendered performative activity in the studio. My body as a kind of shape transmutes into a material surface, resisting its use. The images feel like stand-ins for painterly exploration, and my ability to get to the subject occurs through my material investigation. The process is a kind of working through, staying with the conceptual unknown, and a withholding of resolution. The art has to be about nothing but be about everything, a kind of trick, a distance that comes close. This desire to not resolve is a method for getting at a form that tries to find itself outside of what is already ok.”
ARTIST BIO:
Rose McBurney graduated with an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2025 and received her BA in Studio Arts from the University of New Orleans in 2023. She lives and works in New Orleans, LA. McBurney is an experimental figurative painter whose work manifests in many forms, paying attention to dreams, recognizing the potential for meaning in mundane moments, experimenting with embodied movement, or exploring material research. In 2025, she was awarded the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship and the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting from the Yale School of Art. Her most recent exhibitions include Powerline at Perrotin Gallery in New York, NY (2025), the Felix Art Fair at With Hair + Nails Gallery in Los Angeles, CA (2025), Freshly for You at Hair+Nails Gallery in New York, NY (2024), Sotto Voce at Perimeter Gallery in Belfast, ME (2024), Selected Works at Good Children Gallery in New Orleans, LA (2020), and Louisiana Contemporary at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, LA (2020).
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