Exhibitions
DAX VAN AALTEN: INCIDENTAL MEDITATIONS
The Red Arrow Gallery / 919 Gallatin Ave., Suite #4 October 10 - November 21st (Reception: October 10 5:00pm - 8:00pm)
Dax van Aalten
Red Arrow is pleased to announce Incidental Meditations, a solo exhibition of six new paintings by Tennessee-based artist Dax van Aalten, opening Saturday, October 10, with a reception from 5–8 PM. The exhibition will remain on view through November 21, 2026.
Incidental Meditations continues a relationship between van Aalten and Red Arrow that now spans nearly a decade. The gallery first presented his solo exhibition Through the Wall in 2017, followed by a second solo exhibition, Transmission, in 2018. His work has remained part of Red Arrow’s program in the years since, including Breathless in 2020 and, most recently, Visible Shifts, his 2025 two-person exhibition with Demetrius Wilson.
Over those years, Red Arrow has had the opportunity not simply to exhibit van Aalten’s work, but to watch the language of his paintings develop. Across successive bodies of work, figures have surfaced and disappeared, abstraction has moved toward and away from representation, and the psychological spaces of earlier paintings have gradually opened into the more atmospheric environments present today. What has remained constant is van Aalten’s commitment to an intuitive process and his willingness to let a painting develop without determining its destination in advance.
That history makes Incidental Meditations a particularly meaningful exhibition for the gallery. Nearly ten years after van Aalten’s first Red Arrow solo presentation, the six paintings in this exhibition reveal both continuity and change: they remain unmistakably connected to the searching, automatic process that has defined his work while introducing an increasingly strong relationship to landscape and the natural world.
van Aalten begins his paintings through quick accumulations of marks, colors, shapes, interruptions, and revisions. One decision leads to another, and images emerge through the process rather than being established beforehand. As he describes it, he is less interested in illustrating an idea than in discovering one through the act of painting.
In the new works, forms suggest leaves, water, flowers, weather, terrain, and growth, but never resolve into specific places. Instead, Van Aalten moves continually between abstraction and recognition. A landscape seems to appear and then recede; depth gives way to surface; something familiar becomes uncertain again.
The exhibition’s title describes the unexpected periods of sustained attention that emerge through this process. van Aalten considers the works meditations not because they originate in stillness, but because each records an extended sequence of looking, working, reconsidering, and discovering.
van Aalten’s practice extends well beyond his history with Red Arrow. His exhibition record reaches back to Tennessee and Los Angeles in the 1990s and includes an extensive period of exhibiting in New York during the 2000s and 2010s. His work has been presented at Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden and Pocket Utopia in New York, Galerie Zürcher in Paris, and Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Santa Monica, among others. In 2014, he completed a month-long residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
With Incidental Meditations, Red Arrow brings that longer history together with a relationship that has now encompassed multiple exhibitions and nearly a decade of conversation around van Aalten’s work. Rather than functioning as a survey, however, the exhibition is deliberately intimate: six paintings that offer a focused view of an artist continuing to test what can happen when the outcome of a painting is allowed to remain unknown.
Image: Dax van Aalten, Evening Burn, 2026, Oil on Panel, 32 x 48 in (81.28 x 121.92 cm)
