ARCMANORO NILES: WHEN THERE’S NOTHING I CAN DO: I GO TO MY HEART
Lehmann Maupin presents When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart, an exhibition of new paintings on canvas by New York-based artist Arcmanoro Niles.
June 12 – August 15, 2025
Known for his colorful paintings that capture the daily, yet intimate moments of contemporary life, Niles turns to portraiture and still life painting in his latest series, exploring the poignancy and vulnerability of deep emotional connections to ordinary places, objects, and people. Across the exhibition, Niles employs his signature vibrant color palette and swaths of glitter to render tight compositions and focused, singular subject matter, delving into personal relationships and memories—or as critic Seph Rodney writes, to make “oil and acrylic paintings that do something unconventional under the cloak of conventionality.” This presentation comes on the heels of Niles' recent inclusion in exhibitions at the Barberini Palace in Rome, the Museum Kampa in Prague, and the Parrish Museum in Water Mill, NY; the show also precedes a summer 2026 solo museum exhibition of Niles’ work at the Guild Hall in East Hampton, NY.
Niles is known for his brightly-hued paintings that expand our understanding of traditional genre painting and portraiture. His work offers a window into colloquial moments of daily life―a woman seated at a restaurant table, a child eating an apple, an elderly man playing checkers―with subjects drawn from photographs of friends and relatives and from memories of his past. In depicting not only people close to him but the places and times they inhabit, Niles creates his own record of contemporary life.
The paintings, though intensely personal and autobiographical, engage in universal subjects of domestic and family life while referring to numerous art historical predecessors, including Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, and Color Field painting. Influenced by poetry, Niles’ titles often suggest an underlying narrative behind the seemingly mundane scenes; at the same time, by pairing his own words and images, he seeks to convey a universal sense of emotional experience.
Here and across the exhibition, Niles finds solace in connecting with others through the universal language of art marking, seeking to harness its capacity for catharsis and transformation. He finds solace in the mundane and everyday, “painting what he knows” to seek meaning and preserve memory.