Built of Color

Gabo Sambar Lande, Zack Sanyour, and Noah Shacknai

February 16 – 28, 2026
Opening reception: February 17, 2026, 6 – 8 pm

Built of Color presents paintings and sculptures by three emerging New York-based artists who address the relationship between color and pictorial structure. Ever since Cézanne first faceted his painting surface and Calder set his small bright metal plates in motion, artists have experimented with ways to use color not simply as a decorative enhancement but as an integral component of their compositions. Assimilating these modernist breakthroughs, a new search for synthesis—different for each practitioner—is now revealed in the practices of these young artists.

Gabo Sambar Lande, due to graduate this spring from the Cooper Union, takes the highly unconventional approach of immersing his sculptural forms—here casts of curved brass plumbing pipes and an audio speaker—into thick pools of latex paint. The candy bright paint, bought cheap at Home Depot because it was improperly tinted, hardens into vaguely phallic abstractions rising aslant from the puddles. Placed not atop but beside their pedestals, the works engage in an implicit Oedipal duel with the towering forms that would ordinarily support them. Lande’s method evokes the bitter critical controversies sparked by the notion that paint (fluid and colorful) and sculpture (solid and structural) are inherently antithetical. Thus the shock of discovering that Greek statues, contra Winckelmann’s emphasis on pure form, had originally been gaudily painted was echoed centuries later by Clement Greenberg’s “corrective” removal of pigment from David Smith’s steel constructs.

Vertical structural elements dominate in the two paintings by Noah Shacknai, holder of a BA (2025) from Wesleyan University. The post-and-lintel framing device, which recalls Richard Diebenkorn’s subdued tonality and formal interplay between flatness and depth, centers an abstracted cartoon head in Winking Sky (2024) and two black spheres—shades of Robert Motherwell’s series “Elegy for the Spanish Republic”—in Outdoor Bowling Alley Idea (2024-25). This “look into” quality, coupled with the works’ door-like dimensions, brings to mind William Blake’s mystic pronouncement: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: infinite”—a thought taken up by figures ranging from Aldous Huxley to Allen Ginsberg to Jim Morrison and the Doors.

Zack Sanyour, a figurative painter who received his BFA in 2025 from the Rhode Island School of Design, uses color both to establish compositional counterpoint and to set an overall mood. One work features a fleshy young woman, her hair piled high, tossing a glance over her bare shoulder at a bespectacled young man passing head-down behind her. In a second picture, a young woman, clearly in the mood for love, lies propped on a pillow as she stares out at the viewer, the green of her panties echoing the green of a nearby plant and table. This verdant invitation, however, is tainted by an overall yellow haze—the color of jealousy. With equal ambiguity, a young dark-haired woman in a T-shirt, stationed at the left edge of a third painting, seems to stare wide-eyed, head thoughtfully cocked, into an internal void. The gray-toned room behind her is riven by a red slash of curtain, like a wound still fresh and unhealing.

These three artists, each just beginning his professional career, remind us that new visions often arise through tried-and-true means—in this case, the fusion of color and composition, emotion and meaning. Built of Color bespeaks hope for art’s future, even in a dark time.

Written by Richard Vine

Richard Vine is the former managing editor of Art in America. He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Chicago and previously served as editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review and of Dialogue: An Art Journal. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Conservatory of Music, the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, the New School for Social Research, and New York University. Some three hundred of his articles, reviews, and interviews have appeared in various journals, including Art in America, Salmagundi, Georgia Review, Tema Celeste, Modern Poetry Studies, and the New Criterion. He has made presentations at more than 125 universities, museums, and other cultural venues in cities throughout the US and abroad, including Venice, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, and Saint Petersburg. His critical books include the career survey Odd Nerdrum: Paintings, Sketches, and Drawings (2001) and New China, New Art (2008), which traces the emergence of avant-garde art in post-Mao China. In 2016 he published the crime novel SoHo Sins, set in the New York art world of the 1990s. In addition, he has co-curated exhibitions at the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2013); the National Academy of Art in New Delhi, India (2015). He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics and Mensa.

Exhibition:
9 E. 53rd St, New York, NY 10022

Gallery Hours:
Saturday – Sunday, 10 AM – 6 PM
and by appointment only (please text us at 551-574-0533)

For more information, please contact:
Wook + Lattuada Gallery
nyc@wooklattuada.com
TEL: +1 551 574 0533