Calida Rawles: Parallax at Lehmann Maupin

Lehmann Maupin's New York gallery in Chelsea is showing new paintings by Calida Rawles under the title Parallax, on view October 15 through November 14, 2026. The show starts from a plain observation: when you change where you stand, the same moment can look entirely different.

Rawles was born in 1976 in Wilmington, Delaware, and is known for paintings that join hyperrealism with poetic abstraction. She places Black subjects in fluid, shifting environments and treats water both as a material and as a historically loaded space where questions of identity, memory, healing, and belonging surface. Her subjects can appear buoyant and joyful in one canvas and submerged and enigmatic in another, floating among bubbles, ripples, and refracted light. Water, for her, carries a double meaning: it can stand for physical and spiritual restoration while also recalling trauma, racial exclusion, and displacement. Drawing on history, mythology, philosophy, and politics, she reimagines Black figures outside racialized tropes. A ripple may hide a face and, in the same gesture, reveal something less obvious.

The exhibition centers on three paintings based on photographs Rawles took of her youngest daughter in a pool. She moved around the girl in the water, and the images were made within seconds of each other. They record nearly the same instant, yet each shift in position produced a different composition and a different visual experience. The artist describes her interest in how proximity, distance, angle, and movement can transform what we see without altering the moment itself.

The works on view include Call Me Back, Axis of Paradise, and The Geometry of Origins, all from 2026. Through abstraction, water, light, and movement around the figure, they build spaces that feel both intimate and expansive. In the artist's words, the show considers the relationship between perception and position, and how a change of vantage can alter not only what we see but how we understand it.

The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM, at 501 West 24th Street, with extended hours on Thursday, October 29, from 6 to 8 PM.