Arcmanoro Niles

Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present When There’s Nothing I Can Do: I Go to My Heart, an exhibition of new paintings on canvas by New York-based artist Arcmanoro Niles. Known for his colorful paintings that capture the daily, yet intimate moments of contemporary life, Niles turns to portraiture and still life painting in his latest series, exploring the poignancy and vulnerability of deep emotional connections to ordinary places, objects, and people. “I’ve realized how important it is to take time to connect with the people and things you love, especially when you feel hopeless. These connections and the memory of these moments can remind us of who we are and what's important—and can provide answers on how to move forward.” —Arcmanoro Niles Across the exhibition, Niles immerses himself in his intimate relationships to specific people and settings, capturing and elevating their essence through artmaking; his paintings crystallize memory, freezing moments in time. In One Day My Bark Will Lose Its Bite (I Haven’t Seen My Father in Sometime) (2025), for example, Niles depicts an aging man seated at a table with a game of checkers laid out in front of him, his hand raised near his ear as though straining to listen to his opponent seated opposite him. The walls behind him are covered in framed images, and the entire composition is rendered in a range of blue hues, suggestive of a family home steeped in nostalgia. Niles’ composition places his viewer in the seat across from his subject, implicating them in the narrative. In this way, Niles invites viewers to commune with their own inner lives and memories through interaction with his own. Across the exhibition, Niles employs his signature vibrant color palette and swaths of glitter to render tight compositions and focused, singular subject matter, delving into personal relationships and memories—or as critic Seph Rodney writes, to make “oil and acrylic paintings that do something unconventional under the cloak of conventionality.” Niles is known for his brightly-hued paintings that expand our understanding of traditional genre painting and portraiture. His work offers a window into colloquial moments of daily life―a woman seated at a restaurant table, a child eating an apple, an elderly man playing checkers―with subjects drawn from photographs of friends and relatives and from memories of his past. In depicting not only people close to him but the places and times they inhabit, Niles creates his own record of contemporary life. The paintings, though intensely personal and autobiographical, engage in universal subjects of domestic and family life while referring to numerous art historical predecessors, including Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, and Color Field painting. Influenced by poetry, Niles’ titles often suggest an underlying narrative behind the seemingly mundane scenes; at the same time, by pairing his own words and images, he seeks to convey a universal sense of emotional experience. Arcmanoro Niles (b. 1989, Washington, DC; lives and works in New York, NY) received a B.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA in 2013 and an M.F.A. from New York Academy of Art, New York, NY in 2015. Solo exhibitions of his work have recently been organized at Lehmann Maupin, London, United Kingdom (2022); Lehmann Maupin, New York, NY (2021); UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles, CA (2020); Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY (2019); Long Gallery, New York, NY (2017); and Guild Hall, East Hampton, NY (2016). His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Aishti Foundation, Jal El Dib, Lebanon; Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Yuz Museum, Shanghai, China; and Zabludowicz Collection, London, United Kingdom, among others.

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