Just Two

Morgan Lehman Gallery is pleased to present _Just Two_, a group exhibition curated by the anonymous creator behind the beloved Instagram account **Always Looking At Art**. Marking the curator's first physical exhibition, Just Two brings together artists whose works are united by a straightforward premise: each employs only two colors. Always Looking At Art has cultivated a devoted following by assembling thoughtful online collections that explore such concise themes, bringing together artworks across generations, disciplines, and geographies. This fall their curatorial sensibility moves from the flat, glowing screen to a New York City gallery. Founded as a visual diary, Always Looking At Art began as a place to gather works that genuinely resonated with its creator. Freed from expectation or social obligation, the anonymous account has become a platform for sustained looking, where visual relationships freely emerge out of carefully chosen constraints. _Just Two_ extends that methodology into the material realm, inviting artists whose two-color restriction moves beyond mere color relationships to foreground aspects of making that are best experienced in person: process, surface, and art as object. Stephen Maine forgoes the paint brush, working with printing plates and letting chance take a hand in building up his vibrant, tactile paintings. David Schell layers up oil, cold wax, and pumice on shaped panels until the unmistakably human labor of their making is visible. Tracy Thomason works marble dust into her paintings, thickening her paint and producing an almost geologically kinetic surface, while Anna Gleeson's hand-built ceramics and stoneware bases blur the line between vessel and support. Gwen Hardie pushes in the opposite direction, using subtle gradients that only resolve standing in front of the canvas, turning paintings that read as nearly monochrome into still meditations on two closely related colors. Leigh Suggs works the negative space, hand-cutting forms so precisely that the artwork's white support becomes as essential to the image as the blue-painted Yupo paper mounted to it. Finally, Scott Troxel's wooden wall sculptures shift as you move around them, stretching crisp, geometric color relationships toward a looser, more earthy feeling. _Just Two_ is evidence of how a flat optical constraint like color can generate a richness of material, process, and presence within the gallery as a physical site.