Bushwick Gallery, a contemporary art space in Brooklyn, presents “Gesture in Time,” a rare solo exhibition by Ray Rogers, a painter born in 1933 whose seven-decade practice approaches abstraction as a lived event rather than a constructed image. Bringing together large-scale canvases from across Rogers’s studio archive, the exhibition offers an immersive encounter with an artist who continues to work with clarity, urgency, and uncompromising conviction.
“There is a generosity in Ray’s use of color and a confidence in his mark making that creates real atmosphere on the canvas. The work breathes. It pulls you into a space where control and abandon coexist. That tension makes these paintings compelling and places them squarely in conversation with contemporary abstraction today,” said Gina Keatley, Bushwick Gallery’s owner and curator.
Abstract painting has long been defined by its tension between control and abandon, yet few artists sustain that dialogue across an entire lifetime. At the center of Rogers’s practice is the belief that abstraction should remain immediate, unmediated, and unrevised. His canvases register decisive movement: color sweeps across the surface in broad chromatic arcs; line emerges as elastic calligraphy; atmosphere accumulates through gestures that are intuitive rather than predetermined. The result is a visual score composed through rhythm, tempo, and spatial dynamics as much as through pigment.
Though Rogers’s work is historically informed by Abstract Expressionism, “Gesture in Time” underscores his refusal to lapse into mid-century nostalgia. The paintings possess a contemporary immediacy — free from reverence, free from the weight of myths that surround the genre. What emerges is an artist committed to discovery: visual events that collide, dissipate, and reform without the burden of narrative or symbolic expectation.
Rogers’s biography reinforces this sensibility. Born in Kansas City in 1933 and raised in Tulsa, he entered painting through early draftsmanship and classical music — an art form that continues to shape his pacing and tonal registers. He studied at the University of Arkansas and the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center before completing his M.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied with Robert Motherwell and George McNeil. Early exhibitions at Max Hutchinson Gallery in New York, Bennington College in Vermont, Bennett College in New York, and the University of California, Berkeley, positioned Rogers among serious practitioners of the period.
What distinguishes “Gesture in Time” is not historical credential but uninterrupted studio continuity. Rogers has treated painting not as a phase or period, but as a sustained intellectual and sensory pursuit. Now working between Brewster, New York, and Sedona, Arizona, he continues to produce paintings that feel unedited and alive, with titles referencing landscapes, musical movements, and places etched into memory.
Within Bushwick Gallery’s curatorial framework, “Gesture in Time” situates Rogers not as an artifact of Abstract Expressionism but as an active participant in its ongoing evolution. For collectors, the exhibition represents a rare opportunity to engage firsthand with a historically grounded abstract practice that remains startlingly fresh.
Across the exhibition, one senses a refusal to treat painting as performance or spectacle. Instead, Rogers allows each mark to assert itself in real time. The approach carries risk — ruptures, hesitations, asymmetries — but yields canvases that vibrate with authenticity. If Abstract Expressionism began as a search for immediacy, Rogers has quietly sustained that search.
“Gesture in Time” reminds us that the genre was never about grandeur alone, but about the courage to act, adjust, and leave the record intact.
The exhibit will run from March 5 to 12 with an opening reception on Thursday, March 5, from 6 to 8 PM. Private showings are available by appointment throughout the week.