NEW YORK, NY.- Miles McEnery Gallery is presenting an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Warren Isensee. The artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery is on view 8 January through 14 February 2026 at 511 West 22nd Street. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated publication featuring an essay by Stephen Westfall.

Warren Isensee’s newest paintings unfold as kaleidoscopes of color and kineticism, captivating viewers with their optically charged precision and palpable sense of consciousness. Each offers a distinctly cerebral presence, their brain-like forms engaging the mind’s eye with a delicate balance of structure and spontaneity. His masterful shifts between warm and cool tones create a rhythmic pulse, drawing the viewer into harmonies that hover between intention and intuition.

One might liken Isensee’s compositions to architectural blueprints slipping into dream states—structures held in place just firmly enough to allow their internal rhythms to roam. In this context, Runaway emerges as an asymmetrical outlier amid his signature mirrored symmetries. Its bursts of sporadic and continuous lines trace and retrace the familiar gridwork of Isensee’s visual language, probing the surface of sequenced chromatic synapses and allowing unpredictability to infiltrate the artist’s disciplined formal world.

Stephen Westfall observes how “Isensee’s new paintings strike me as more complex overall in their spatial connotations, and freer in their willingness to break the bottom-to-top chromatic certainties of where colors should go to complete patterns.” He continues, “At no place do the interior colors in the positive shapes change their color, but the Albersian effect of simultaneous contrast suggests they move from shadow to light. Pointedly, this entire effect is a path out of chromatic symmetry, or mirroring, into a freeing dynamism.”

Warren Isensee (b. 1956 in Asheville, NC) studied architecture at the University of Oklahoma before majoring in painting and graphic design. In 1999, he received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and, in 2007, received the Purchase Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters after participating in the annual Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts.

His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Danese/Corey, New York, NY; Kevin Bruk Gallery, Miami, FL; Massimo Audiello, New York, NY; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Nina Freudenheim Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Pamela Salisbury Gallery, Hudson, NY; Tricia Collins Contemporary Art, New York, NY; and Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT.

Isensee has been included in group exhibitions at institutions including the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY; The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY; Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI; Herter Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, NY; The National Arts Club, New York, NY; and Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS, among others.

His work may be found in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, TX; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Museum of Contemporary Art Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Neuberger Berman Collection, New York, NY; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase, NY; and The Penn Art Collection, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, among others.

The artist lives and works in New York, NY.