Satchel Projects is pleased to present Out There, a solo exhibition of work by Brooklyn–based artist Laura Newman, on view from January 8 through February 7, 2025. The exhibition will include five new paintings on canvas and linen as well as eight recent works on handmade wasli paper.

Building on her earlier explorations of abstraction and the painterly articulation of space, Laura Newman’s recent works move into new dimensional and material terrain. Extending her characteristic dynamic constructions that evoke webs, scaffolds, and stained glass, the works in Out There embrace greater complexity and unpredictability, creating luminous, multiplanar sites that feel intuitively legible while allowing for the possibility of discovery.

Newman’s spatial thinking is informed by the urban architecture outside her Brooklyn studio window. Over time, the artist has observed a city in constant revision, with scaffolding rising and falling, buildings altered, and sightlines continually shifting. Windows, street signs, planes, and angular intersections enter the paintings not as images but as spatial rhythms. This sustained attentiveness to change found a conceptual counterpart in her encounters with Japanese architecture and the concept of ma, which understands negative space as active and full of potential.

In the larger paintings on view, Newman uses acrylic, ink, oil, flashe and spray paint to conjure space through a combination of direct and indirect physical processes. Pours and washes generate atmospheric depth, while open structures take shape through hard-edged perspectival geometries and energetic gestural passages. Angular black lines perform multiple roles, whether implying motion and direction, building dimensional armatures, or suggesting symbols suspended in space. Color operates across an expanded dynamic range, with quieter, twilit fields punctuated by moments of heightened chromatic intensity. Smaller paintings are more concentrated sites of action and interaction, focused moments of energy.

While traveling in India, Newman was introduced to handmade wasli, a recycled, multi-ply paper that was developed in the 10th century and primarily used for painting miniatures. As Newman physically interacts with the material fiber of this paper, abrasions and tears become their own category of mark that take their place alongside stains, lines and brushstrokes. In her words, “I tear off shards of paper and fill them in with paint, and the torn shapes become sort of a trompe l’oeil collage. They float through a scaffolding of dry-brushed calligraphic ink lines and translucent pours of paint.”

In Out There, painting is proposed as a place of openness, a space capable of holding complexity, contradiction, and uncertainty. These works do not ask to be decoded, but inhabited — the viewer is the figure in an unfolding, expansive landscape. In Newman’s paintings, we are invited to move, linger, and find our own way through environments that remain provisional and alive, mirroring both the changing world around us and the mutable nature of perception itself.

Laura Newman is a Brooklyn-based abstract painter who makes improvisational abstract paintings and works on paper.  She has been awarded fellowships from major institutions including the Guggenheim, the Rome Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the New York Foundation on the Arts. Residencies include The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and The American Academy in Rome. She has had solo exhibitions at James Fuentes, New York, Victoria Munroe Fine Arts, New York, The University of Connecticut, Storrs, and was included in group exhibitions at The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, 490 Atlantic Gallery, Brooklyn, Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, Waterhouse and Dodd, New York, and The University of Indiana, Columbus, among many others. Her work has been discussed in The Brooklyn Rail, ArtCritical.com, The Drawer-Revue de Dessin, Artforum, The New York Times, and Bomb Magazine. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Newman was educated at Cooper Union, The California Institute of the Arts and The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She is a Professor of Art at Vassar College.