NOW on View 

PEOPLE, PLACES & THINGS Hannah Barrett/ Mark Adams/ Tess Michalik 

February 28 - April 6, 2026  

THINGS: TESS MICHALIK   Born in Richmond Virginia and based in Brooklyn, Tess Michalik received a BFA from Herron School of Art in 2010 and an MFA from Northern Illinois University in 2014. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at art institutions, university galleries, community spaces, contemporary art galleries, and art fairs including Art Los Angeles Contemporary, Papier Montreal, Palm Beach Modern + Contemporary, and Future Fair 2025, etc. In 2018, Tess had her first museum exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Manitoba, Canada. Her paintings have been published internationally in Architectural Digest and her work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York in the permanent collection of WAG-Qaumajuq. 

Michalik makes paintings with oil paint on canvas, linen, and on solid substrates like wood panels. Her work, often sourced from garden spaces and textile patterns that define certain worlds of etiquette and class, are thick, rich, frosting-like paintings made in a sequence of wet-on-wet studio sessions. Her lush and sensual object-like paintings show what paint can do and are made as if paint is simply an everyday means to an outlandish and too beautiful end. Michalik’s work seems about to swoon forward from their backgrounds directly into our laps, as if to recognize our desire for too much cake and tasty syrup.