The Massey Klein Gallery in New York presents "Aberration," a solo exhibition by American artist Nick McPhail from September 6 to October 18, 2025. Paintings and ceramics intersect in a dialogue around spatial perception, memory, and temporality.

With "Aberration," Nick McPhail continues an exploration he began several years ago: questioning how we perceive space through the filter of memory. The exhibition unveils two new series of works, paintings and ceramics, all stemming from recent experiments with materiality and perception. 

The handmade ceramics offer an unexpected entry point into the artist's work. Inspired by simple, everyday forms like a milk jug, they serve as a canvas for a free, intuitive painting style that envelops each object in a perpetually transforming landscape. McPhail uses these volumes as surfaces to be painted, abandoning classical perspective in favor of an image that unfolds slowly, in curves, folds, and shifts. The result: a visual experience that rejects stillness and suggests a world seen not as a frozen scene, but as a moving impression, filtered through memory and physical presence.

In his new paintings, McPhail explores an extended temporality. There is no longer a single scene or immediate composition. Each canvas emerges from a slow, fragmented process, in which the artist tirelessly returns to his work, sometimes weeks or even months later. The result is layered images, spaces of mental resonance where real places, memories, and recomposed perceptions coexist. In these constantly evolving compositions, buildings float, horizons flicker, and urban details mingle with sensitive evocations. The gaze navigates between presence and erasure. 

This work is not merely a matter of style, but of structure. Time here becomes a constitutive element of the image. The painting becomes the witness to a memory in construction. McPhail allows himself accidents, backtracking, changes of direction. Each work functions as a surface for fragments of places, gestures, or atmospheres, without seeking to fix a single meaning. It is about painting not simply a place, but also the memory of that place. Not something seen, but something felt, remembered, recomposed. 

This shift towards a more sensory painting and a more pictorial sculpture marks a significant step in the artist's trajectory. A graduate in painting and ceramics from Michigan State University, Nick McPhail has enriched his practice through numerous artist residencies, notably in Omaha, Nebraska; Johnson, Vermont; Paradou, France; and Geneva, Switzerland. He has exhibited in many cities, including Berlin, Paris, Düsseldorf, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and Stockholm. In 2019, his public mural Power LinesPainted on aluminum, it was installed in Echo Park, Los Angeles, offering the city a suspended architectural landscape measuring 12 square meters. Her work is featured in several prestigious collections, including those of Morgan Stanley in New York and Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles.

With "Aberration," the Massey Klein Gallery reaffirms its commitment to artists capable of challenging traditional codes of representation. McPhail doesn't illustrate reality: he explores what remains of a place once we've stopped seeing it. What our bodies retain, what our memory invents. In his works, painting doesn't fix a single truth but embraces a plurality of perspectives, temporalities, and lived experiences.

By combining revisited utilitarian ceramics and atmospheric paintings, "Aberration" offers a journey where the viewer is invited to slow down, to let themselves be traversed by the image, to consider art not as a window, but as a mirror of our moving perceptions. 

“Nick McPhail – Aberration”
Massey Klein Gallery
124 Forsyth Street, New York (United States)
From 6 September to 18 October 2025 

masseyklein.com