The Empty Circle: Space for Art, Music, and Theater

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The Empty Circle: Space for Art, Music, and Theater

The Empty Circle is a space for creation and destruction, the melting drowsiness on the verge of sleep.

05/26/2026

⏩️ Swipe to trace the shift from study to painting.

Currently on view at The Empty Circle (), Zachary Lank’s intimate studies are presented alongside their fully realized painting counterparts—offering a rare glimpse into the artist’s evolving visual language. Working in acrylic gouache on paper, these small-scale works distill the compositions to their essential gestures, where form, movement, and symbolism first take shape.

In “Study of The Visitors” (2026), sinuous, interlocking bodies unfurl across the surface, their mirrored rhythms suggesting a quiet exchange—part ritual, part encounter. Meanwhile, “Study of The Messenger” (2026) introduces a more vertical, totemic structure, where two figures seem to channel a shared energy through a central axis, hinting at transformation and transmission.

Rather than functioning as preliminary sketches, these studies hold their own as resolved works—revealing how Lank builds worlds through repetition, variation, and refinement. Seen in dialogue with the larger canvases, they underscore a process rooted in intuition, where meaning emerges gradually, shaped as much by iteration as by intention.

These works are on view as part of “By Lethe, Dreaming,” curated by Will Cotton, through May 30, 2026.

05/22/2026

👀 Currently on view at the gallery is Zachary Lank’s “The Goner” (2026).

Here, a solitary figure seems to wander through a barren, cemetery-like expanse, passing remnants that suggest a world already left behind. But the body resists solidity: its upper form spirals outward into a tornado-like plume, blurring the boundary between figure and force. What emerges is a being in-between—part human, part apparition—caught in the threshold between the living and the unknown.

The work is currently on view as part of “By Lethe, Dreaming,” Lank’s solo exhibition curated by Will Cotton, on view through May 30, 2026 at The Empty Circle.

Image: The Goner, 2026, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches. Installation views by Studio Kukla.

05/19/2026

👀 Zachary Lank’s preparatory sketches, on view alongside their painting counterparts at The Empty Circle, offer a rare glimpse into the artist’s process—where composition, gesture, and symbolism are carefully worked through before reaching their final form.

Here, Lank renders the scene in both color and black and white, allowing each version to carry a distinct sensibility: one atmospheric and immersive, the other distilled to structure, light, and form. Across both, a solitary figure appears mid-transformation, their body unraveling into smoke-like tendrils that extend into birds, fragments, and shifting limbs.

These works highlight Lank’s carefully constructed compositions and conceptual precision, revealing how each element is considered, tested, and reimagined. Rather than functioning as mere studies, they stand as parallel expressions—moments where the image is both resolved and still in flux.

On view as part of By Lethe, Dreaming, Lank’s solo exhibition curated by Will Cotton, through May 30, 2026 at The Empty Circle.

Image: Study of The Magician, 2026, acrylic gouache on paper mounted to board, 15.75 x 11 inches. Install shots by Studio Kukla.

05/15/2026

👀 Currently on view at the gallery is Zachary Lank’s “The Messenger” (2026), which presents a symmetrical, almost ceremonial vision in which organic and abstract forms converge around a central axis of light. Twin, mask-like figures seem to mirror one another in a state of suspended animation, their hollowed bodies both receptive and resistant, as a vertical flame pierces the composition like a conduit between realms.

As with much of Lank’s work, the painting resists a singular reading. Instead, it unfolds as a symbolic threshold—where communication becomes transformation, and where the body dissolves into gesture, energy, and form. Meticulously rendered yet untethered from physical logic, “The Messenger” exists in a space where meaning is felt as much as it is seen.

The work is currently on view at the gallery as part of “By Lethe, Dreaming,” Lank’s solo exhibition curated by Will Cotton, on view through May 30, 2026 at The Empty Circle.

Image: The Messenger, 2026, oil on canvas, 34 x 34 inches. Installation view by Studio Kukla.

05/14/2026

This week, stop by Future Fair () for a duo presentation featuring new works by Daniel Kukla () and Catherine Webb (.webb.studio).

Through different media, including sculpture, painting, photographic collages and mixed media, the presentation explores shifting relationships between ecology, identity, materiality, and the human impulse to shape and understand the world around us.

Together, Kukla and Webb create an immersive presentation grounded in transformation and perception. Moving between fragility and resilience, observation and emotion, their works consider how individuals relate to the environments they inhabit while proposing new ways of seeing, interpreting, and caring for the world around them.

📍 Future Fair, 535 West 28 Street, New York
🗓️ Through Saturday, May 16

05/13/2026

📣 Join us today at Future Fair () for our debut presentation at the fair, featuring new works by artists Catherine Webb (.webb.studio) and Daniel Kukla ().

At the fair, Webb presents new oil paintings that merge portraiture, abstraction, and landscape through a vivid and materially expressive visual language. As an advocate for environmental justice, Webb is committed to ecological preservation and approaches painting as both an act of personal reflection and a way to communicate her desire for a better future. Applying paint directly to the canvas with a palette knife, Webb builds dense, tactile surfaces that feel simultaneously intimate and expansive. Her vibrant palette and physical approach to mark-making emphasizes painting as an embodied process, one deeply connected to memory, care and the natural world.

📍 Future Fair, Booth U9
🗓️ May 13–16, 2026

Image: Golden Hour at Rabaioulle, 2025 (framed), oil on linen, 14 x 11 inches

05/12/2026

📣 Join us this week at Future Fair () for our debut presentation at the fair, featuring new works by artists Daniel Kukla () and Catherine Webb (.webb.studio).

Through sculpture, painting, photographic collage, and mixed media, the duo presentation explores ecology, preservation, materiality, and the shifting ways we relate to the natural world around us. Together, both artists consider fragility and resilience, observation and emotion, while proposing new ways of seeing and caring for the environments we inhabit.

📍 Future Fair, Booth U9
🗓️ May 13–16, 2026

Image 1: Daniel Kukla, Moirée 2 (red blue), 2025, detail, marbled acrylic on chromogenic photogram (unique), found gorgonian, felt, 15 x 8 x 10.5 inches
Image 2: Catherine Webb, “Little Dance,” 2025, detail, oil on linen, 12x10 inches

05/11/2026

Zachary Lank’s “The Three Bachelors” (2026) stages a surreal encounter between the corporeal and the spectral, where figures appear suspended somewhere between collapse, transformation, and transcendence. Empty garments twist and fold into impossible forms, while floating hats, smoke, and scattered relics destabilize any fixed sense of space or narrative.

Rather than offering a clear allegory, the painting unfolds like a vision recalled from the threshold between waking and dreaming. Lank’s meticulously rendered surfaces heighten this tension: the work feels grounded in the traditions of oil painting, yet untethered from physical reality. Presence and absence continually exchange places, allowing the figures to exist as both bodies and apparitions.

The work is currently on view at the gallery as part of “By Lethe, Dreaming,” Lank’s solo exhibition curated by Will Cotton, on view through May 30, 2026 at The Empty Circle

Image: The Three Bachelors, 2026, oil on canvas, 46 x 46 inches

04/29/2026

📣 NOW OPEN: “By Lethe, Dreaming,” a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Zachary Lank, curated by artist Will Cotton. The exhibition explores transcendence, non-duality, and animism, through a rigorous and meticulous painting practice.

This new body of work draws inspiration from George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and Joshua Cutchin’s Ecology of Souls, texts that engage with death, spirituality, and the permeability between states of being. Lank is particularly interested in transcendence and the possibility of moving between worlds, a concept that unfolds across the exhibition through figures that hover between presence and dissolution.

The exhibition will be on view from April 24 to May 30, 2026.

Installation images by Studio Kukla.

04/18/2026

📣 Join us today from 3–5 PM at The Empty Circle for the closing reception of Jaqueline Cedar’s solo “Wave,” a solo exhibition of new paintings by the Brooklyn-based artist.

Navigating the tension between sincerity and interruption, the exhibition explores the romantic, poetic, and occasionally absurd nature of visible reality.

🎟️ Please RSVP through the link in our bio!

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499 3rd Ave
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http://theemptycircle.com/

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