White Columns is pleased to present an exhibition by Wantage, NJ-based artist Goran Medak (b. 1950, Split, Croatia.) Formally educated as an engineer but self-taught as an artist, Medak’s fantastical paintings operate in a liminal space, somewhere between abstraction and representation. Informed by Old Masters like Pieter Bruegel the Elder as much as they are daily life, Medak resists observational painting, a mode that he calls “looking out the window.” Instead, his works are highly aware of the picture plane, negotiating and choreographing disparate elements – and negative space – into compositions that juxtapose fields of color with areas of filigree-like detail. Medak’s exhibition at White Columns — the artist’s first in New York — presents a selection of earlier works from the 1980s and ’90s alongside a more recent series produced throughout the past six years, after the artist’s retirement from his career as a general contractor.

Raised in the former Yugoslavia and educated in Ljubljana, in his 30s Medak spent time in Paris, where he taught himself to paint by revisiting favorite paintings at the Louvre and reproducing them in his home studio, a process of self-instruction that he deems as much conceptual as pedagogical. At the borders of many of these earlier, more “academic” paintings are interventions by the artist, playful intrusions on canonical works of art that seem to anticipate his ongoing interest in the complexities of visual representation. His subsequent Broken Symmetry Manifestation series, an example of which is included in this exhibition, traded more concretely in abstraction and in the disruption of pattern.

Though their relationship to direct, observational representation is slippery, the titles of Medak’s paintings frequently suggest narrative ties to phenomenological experience that might not otherwise be suggested by the images contained therein. A viewer would be hard pressed to identify any discrete mammalian forms in 1998’s Beaver Lodge at Night, but the work nonetheless encapsulates the simultaneously eerie and uncanny feeling of making out the faint contours of a familiar scene when obscured by the cover of evening. Likewise, the more recent Wantage (2021) is named for the artist’s current home in rural New Jersey, which is represented by a triangular slip of scenery including a field, a piece of farming equipment, a pond and some rolling hills. Surrounding these are great painted swathes of red, yellow and blue that disorient our reading of the miniaturized bucolic scene. In Pareidolia in Spring (2023), named for the psychological process by which our minds read “faces” or patterns in random inanimate objects, Medak has twice incorporated his left hand, each palm raised to flank the face of an ambiguous creature, a fleeting interstice in which the “real” world seems almost to intrude upon the world of the painting.

White Columns is pleased to present “Overproof,” a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Karryl Eugene (b. 1998). “Overproof” features a range of works across painting, collage, assemblage, and sound, and debuts the artist’s new EP, No More Evening Plans, consisting of five tracks presented as part of a sound installation within the exhibition. The works on view amplify ideas that have become central to Eugene’s practice over the past five years since earning his BFA in 2020. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to concepts of masculinity, language, desire, portraiture, and community, “Overproof” interrogates what it means to be ‘masculine’ today, and the sociological effects of manhood on both self and others.

Eugene’s practice currently centers on the psychological space of the cis-hetero Black male as a subject—wherein he considers how this positionality moves within cultural archetypes, interpersonal relationships, and the lived experience. Drawing from psychological and existential frameworks, he works through his archive of personal photographs and found digital imagery to construct images that seek to hold both interior and projected identities. Many of Eugene’s works are grounded in the triptych as a compositional structure. Through portraiture, these works abstractly juxtapose self and other. Eugene reframes manipulated imagery sourced from stock images, video games, social gatherings, film stills, boxing weigh-ins, and images of celebrities. These seemingly disparate fragments are layered into allegorical compositions that work to examine the often flattened and monolithic framing of cis-hetero identity.

In What Was Left Of The Johnnie Walker, the left image features an acrylic cutout of an isolated silhouetted figure in a seated pose, while the central image depicts Franklin Clinton, the fictional protagonist from video game Grand Theft Auto V. The right panel includes an altar-like base that holds a decanter partially filled with Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch whiskey. The work examines the notion of consumption, the methods through which individuals pursue escapism, and the ways these strategies shape a sense of self, particularly in manhood. Avoidant Attachment, presenting three variations of physical touch, is an investigation into the psychological space of discomfort with emotional closeness, alongside the comfort of hyper-independence. The Weigh In examines the public display of boxing opponents’ weigh-ins, often ending in an intense “stare-down”. The extreme proximity of the boxers, sometimes pressing lips, is blurred to suggest two men in passionate and romantic embrace. The artist views this transformation as a metaphor for hypermasculinity when pushed to its extremes, often revealing the very intimacy and vulnerability it seeks to remove and distance itself from.

Eugene’s use of laser-cut acrylic text throughout the exhibition examines the fragmentation and concealment of language as a means of exploring the instability of communication. Most evident in Text Painting 001 and Text Painting 002, these works consider how language functions through subversion, ambiguity, and layered meaning. They explore the tension between disclosure and opacity, revealing how communication is shaped by competing desires for articulation and concealment.

Alongside this, the artist’s sound practice operates through music production and DJing. The artist approaches sound as a process of curation, retracing, and collage, often through long-form mixes composed of both selected and self-produced tracks. His work frequently incorporates vocal samples drawn from Calypso and Soca, genres rooted in Trinidad and Tobago, while also engaging broader Caribbean sonic histories across the diaspora. These elements are placed in conversation with production approaches informed by alternative, left-field house, trance, club, and new age rap. Through this process, present in the sound work No More Evening Plans, the artist aims to reimagine the euphoric and emotional register of Caribbean music within his own contemporary sonic language.

Karryl Eugene (b. 1998) lives and works in New York. He is an MFA candidate in the Studio Art program at Hunter College and received his BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020. Eugene has exhibited in the United States and abroad, including in exhibitions at Queue Gallery, Miami (2025), Silke Lindner, New York (2025); David Zwirner, New York (2024); Current Space, Baltimore (2021); the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Baltimore (2020); ONART Gallery, Florence (2019); and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (2018), among others. He has performed at venues such as Cassette NYC, Jupiter Disco NYC, Rash NYC, Mood Ring NYC as DJ duo “Exit Strategy,” and Public Records in a music ensemble called “Judy Unisex.” Eugene has recently been listed in “Hot Picks 2025” for Smack Mellon’s Studio Residency Program.

For further information about this exhibition contact: adeja@whitecolumns.org

White Columns is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Oswald Saenz (b. 1964, Medellín, Colombia). The artist is currently associated with YAI Arts, a nonprofit studio supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities in NYC. Working entirely from his imagination, and often through the middle of the night, Saenz’s drawings depict familiar, quotidian subjects – women, houses, flowers etc. – distilling them down to their most fundamental curves and contours and infusing them with hallucinatory color, wobbling rhythm, and traces of spirit made flesh.

A cousin of the legendary artist Fernando Botero, Saenz taps into the South American tradition of magical realism, in which the natural and supernatural are wrapped up in one another like his tangled vines. Saenz’s self-identification as an artist recurs in his signature at the bottom of many of his drawings; at times, his name is accompanied by the phrase “The Best Artist.” “Not everybody is an artist,” he says. “I was born with it. It felt natural. Ideas pop into my head. I put them on paper.”

Saenz’s vivid palette and often bawdy, almost farcical depictions at times conceal a darker undercurrent of grief. In 2021, the artist’s mother passed away from complications of the Covid virus. Her death deepened Saenz’s interest in the unseen world – angels, mythical animals, dancing flames. His artistic practice, he says, is his mom’s way of speaking through him. Her presence dwells in every woman he conjures on paper.

There’s a strange rhythm to the works present in this exhibition. The stark lines in the artist’s conception of architectural and interior spaces differ from the flowing curves manifest in the flora and fauna present elsewhere; the over encompassing saturation of color is highly contrasted by the absence of it in other works. Highly structured scenes of dark and seedy bars and pool halls are redolent of adult life, while Saenz’s more loosely rendered cartoon-like figures hover at the threshold between the playful and the fantastical. Saenz’s highly idiosyncratic visual world is both a straightforward evocation of art’s inherent animism and an invocation of the spiritual forces that imbue daily life with meaning.

Oswald Saenz was born in Medellín, Colombia and moved to New York in 1974; he currently works at YAI Arts in Manhattan. He was artist-in-residence at Summertime in 2021, culminating in the solo exhibition Deborah.

For further information about this exhibition contact: violet@whitecolumns.org

To learn more about YAI’s mission and programs: www.yai.org/yaiarts

White Columns’ 2026 summer programs focus on the work of artists who are currently represented in White Columns’ Curated Artist Registry, and have been organized by Violet Saxon (Curatorial Assistant) and Adeja Sterling (Gallery Assistant). Founded in the early 1980s the Registry provides a platform for artists – of all kinds – currently without gallery representation in New York. The Registry currently includes the work of more than 500 individual artists.

To learn more about the Registry, please visit: registry.whitecolumns.org

Gallery hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 11am to 6pm

White Columns
91 Horatio Street
New York, NY 10014
Tuesday–Saturday, 11 AM–6 PM
info@whitecolumns.org
Instagram