Joseph Hart: Songs Against Themselves | May 20 - July 2, 2026

Romer Young Gallery is excited to present Songs Against Themselves, a solo exhibition of recent work by New York-based artist Joseph Hart. There will be an opening reception on Wednesday, May 20th, from 5-8PM. The exhibition will be on view May 15th through July 2, 2026.

Aesthetically and conceptually, Songs Against Themselves continues to unravel and play with imagery from the natural world, abstraction, drawing vs painting, and aggregating the emotional complexity of our times. The artist writes ‘these paintings are trojan horses that hold divergent ideas and emotions: rage, joy, fear, beauty and grotesqueness, love, poems, conflict and resolution, the slips between control and chaos…” Hart seeks to find a balance between the challenges and joys of this life and world, and attempts to reconcile how complicated (and rhetorical) that pursuit is through the process of making a painting.

Hart has always woven drawing into his daily life, like a grounding meditation. Hundreds of drawings using graphite sticks are the earnest and honest beginnings. After finding and landing on a formal direction through drawing, Hart dimensionally scales up and pivots to using crayon and acrylic paint on stretched canvas. The drawings, however, are not sketches for paintings. Instead, the most special discoveries from the drawings collide into the singular new paintings. The painting begins with a crayon under-drawing that operates like an armature for layers of paint to build up on top of. Various parts of paintings then begin to cross-pollinate into newer paintings. Sequences from one painting are flipped, reimagined into the next, like a play on itself. This underscores Hart’s ethos that new ideas are usually born out of and improved upon existing ideas.

Hart’s esthetic evolution has been similar to his line, wandering but purposeful: cartoons, comics and picture books, graphics and subculture art from skateboarding and music, stylized and illustration-based artwork, a slow unraveling of representational imagery, non-representation, to the current use of observational abstraction. Understanding the history contextualizes why the work looks the way it does.

A majority of the forms and imagery in this body of work come from the natural world: errant catalpa leaves and seed pods that pepper the sidewalk in front of Hart’s New York building, decorative eucalyptus trees, a collection of animal skulls the artist has in his studio, gorilla flower gardens planted in reclaimed sections of sidewalk, and foods from packed studio lunches. Drawing from observation and memory, Hart repeats, intertwines and overlaps until something that is visually provocative emerges.

Joseph Hart is a New York-based visual artist that makes drawings and paintings. He is also the founder and producer of Deep Color, the celebrated oral history project and podcast that features artists and arts professionals discussing their work, ideas, and lives. Hart’s artwork can be found in the public collections of the RISD Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Davis Museum at Wellesley College, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, Penland School of Craft and The City College of New York. Hart received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1999. He lives in Brooklyn, NY with his partner and two children.

Truffle Hound | July 15 - August 22, 2026

Featured Artists:
Johnny Abrahams, Amanda Curreri, Vaughn Davis Jr., Elise Ferguson, Joseph Hart, Sarah Hotchkiss, Pamela Jorden, Bessma Khalaf, Susan O’Malley, Gwenaël Rattke, Christoph Roßner, Erik Scollon, Ryan Wallace, Kevin Umana, and Nancy White

Artist Lucio Pozzi described Herbert Vogel as a "truffle hound" to describe the New York postal worker’s uncanny ability to instinctively locate and acquire exceptional, overlooked contemporary art. The Vogels primarily collected small-scale drawings, sketches, and other works on paper, which allowed them to maximize their space. When the Vogels began their collection, they followed three restrictions: they had to be able to afford the artwork, carry it home via taxi or subway, and fit it within their 450-square-foot, one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. The truffle hound metaphor highlights Herb's “impulsive yet brilliant talent” for identifying significant art, enabling him and his wife, Dorothy, to amass one of the most significant collections of 20th-century American art on a working-class budget.

Art on paper has held a significant place in the history of artistic expression and has often been seen as the preparatory medium for the work of art. Historically, it has also democratized art, making it more accessible to creators and collectors, and encouraging broader experimentation with styles and ideas. Over the years, Romer Young Gallery has amassed a collection of small works that rarely see the light of day. Truffle Hound celebrates the work on paper (or conceptual equivalent) as the vital, non-preparatory, finished form of its execution, and highlights the foundational role these works play as the “beginning of everything,” the creative act that “puts a line around an idea,” the “visual diary of a personal world."

Images:

Joseph Hart Eucalyptus, 2026, acrylic paint on canvas 64" x 50"

Sarah Hotchkiss Grammar, 2022, acrylic gouache on paper 12" x 12"