Allison Gildersleeve: Gathering

Upsilon Gallery | New York is pleased to present Gathering, Allison Gildersleeve’s first solo exhibition with Upsilon, bringing together selected paintings built around a simple impulse: to be inside the space she creates. Opening on Thursday, May 7th, from 6 to 8 PM, at 23 E 67th St, the exhibition is on view through Thursday, June 18th, 2026. 

Working primarily in oil painting, Gildersleeve develops a richly layered visual language that moves between landscape, interior, and abstraction. Based in Brooklyn, her practice draws from memory, place, and the textures of domestic life, constructing compositions that resist fixed spatial or temporal orientation. Her paintings operate as accumulations, where moments separated by years converge within a single pictorial field, and where the monumental and the everyday are granted equal presence. 

Raised in a colonial farmhouse in southeastern Connecticut, surrounded by woodland, Gildersleeve established an early and sustained relationship with the rural landscapes of New England. She continues to return to this region as a primary source of imagery. The formative experience of an unstructured childhood spent moving freely through these environments informs her enduring focus on how memory is formed through repetition and gradual transformation. Her work reflects a persistent attention to the instability of recollection, and the way lived experience resists resolution. 

Central to Gildersleeve’s practice is a desire to inhabit the spaces she constructs, as well as an invitation to the viewer to enter the room.  Working from an ongoing sketchbook of ink drawings, she distils recurring motifs such as chairs, flowers, and scissors into a visual vocabulary. These elements are not illustrative but positional. The chair, in particular, functions as a stand-in for the artist herself, a way of granting presence within the painted space, as she describes it, giving herself a seat. Figures are notably absent from her compositions, as their inclusion would shift the work toward portraiture. Instead, Gildersleeve evokes the presence of others through objects: flowers as an ode to her sister, or everyday tools such as scissors, which signal an impulse towards creation. Within the paintings, these forms move fluidly across scale and context, allowing memory, association, and identity to surface indirectly through arrangement rather than depiction. 

Gildersleeve received the Elaine de Kooning Memorial Fellowship following the completion of her MFA at Bard College in 2004. She is a two-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting. Her work has been selected for exhibition by Joan Snyder and reviewed in The New York Times by chief art critic Roberta Smith. Additional coverage includes ArtCritical, The Washington Post, and Elephant Magazine. 

In 2025, Gildersleeve presented Here Somewhere, a solo museum exhibition at the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the United States, Sweden, and South Korea, and was presented at Rockefeller Center in 2025. Her paintings are held in private collections in the United States and Europe. 

Opening reception: May 7, 2026, 6–8 PM 
On view: May 7 – June 18, 2026