Steven Seinberg's exhibition Reliquary has been extended through February 8th in coordination with an upcoming announcement in gallery programming.

The formal prowess of Seinberg’s practice finds its roots in a lineage of abstractionist that includes Mark Rothko, Cy Twombly, and Clyfford Still, artists whose work transcended aesthetic concerns to delve into the depths of human emotion and spiritual inquiry. Rothko once spoke of his paintings as facilitating a “religious experience”, and this idea of art as a pathway to transcendence is what I have come to discover is a foundational touchstone of Seinberg’s ethos. But where Rothko’s color fields reach for the sublime in their vastness, Seinberg’s work actualizes that sublimity through their embrace of an uncanny equilibrium, one that reasserts the essential dualities foundational to existence itself.

A turning point in Seinberg’s practice emerged in 2022 with the exhibition, The third book on light and shade. Inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s exploration of illumination and obscurity, Seinberg produced a series of starkly bifurcated canvases that captured the thresholds between light and shadow. These works introduced a profound engagement with duality—not as oppositional forces but as interdependent phenomena that define perception itself. In many ways, this body of work marked the construction of a world parallel to his earlier paintings—a universe informed by the shadows cast by his visual lexicon.

Within The third book on light and shade, Seinberg developed a series of drawings what he refers to as “book pages”—a series of intimate drawings that distill the principles of light and shadow into concentrated, reverential studies. These works, layered with graphite, charcoal, and subtle washes of pigment, reflect da Vinci’s influence while establishing an unmistakable connection to Seinberg’s own conceptual inquiries. The drawings capture a sense of precision and depth that feels ancient yet immediate, as though each line carries the weight of centuries of philosophical reflection.

Seinberg’s practice evolved into this latest series, Reliquary (2023–2024), a body of work created between 2023 and 2024, which extends and deepens these explorations, transforming the stark contrasts of his “light and shade” canvases into something more intricate, more resonant. Where The third book on light and shade charted the terrain of light and shade as elemental phenomena, Reliquary inhabits the spaces between—moments where presence and absence, materiality and impermanence, converge into a singular, charged equilibrium. Vessel-like forms began to emerge in his drawings.

Most notably in works on paper like Collected, not found (2024), where fine graphite lines and subtle tonal gradations create shapes that evoke the idea of holding—light, memory, and the intangible. These forms, which were introduced in the drawings, became central to the larger paintings, reinforcing the idea that Seinberg’s drawings serve as the conceptual and formal foundation of his broader practice. He describes these drawings as akin to haikus, distilling complex ideas into concise, evocative gestures.

For the first time in his three-decade-long career, Steven Seinberg has introduced sculpture into his practice, a development that both complements and expands his language. These objects, some found and transformed by the artist’s hand like Reliquary X and Reliquary I, are composed of reclaimed wood from furniture belonging to his grandparents’ Brooklyn home, infusing them with personal history and memory. The use of these fragments—teeming with the presence of a life lived—creates a sense of intimacy that anchors the sculptures in the same spirit as the reliquaries the artist discovered throughout his travels and echo the containment and transformation that pervade his drawings and paintings. They are at once protectors of what is contained and objects of contemplation themselves, evoking a tension between fragility and permanence, absence and presence.