Hannah Beerman

Kim and Gupta Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Hannah Beerman (b. 1992) featuring new and earlier paintings by the artist. This exhibition is the artist’s first solo presentation with the gallery.

The exhibition brings together new and earlier paintings that reflect experimentation, play, and struggle—a testament to the artist's commitment to intimate vulnerabilities with the self and the world. Anchored by bold and bright colors and collage, the work engages themes of growing pains, absurdity, chance, and humor. Each element is earned through careful accumulation, each found object sits alongside gestural abstraction not by accident, but by devotion—a devotion to playing and experimenting through it all.

Born into a creative household, Beerman grew up surrounded by making. Her parents met at Skowhegan artist colony in the 1980s; her grandmother was a printmaker who filled their Victorian home in Nyack with wild sculptural assemblages—cages with light-up geese, engraved ostrich eggs strung with chili pepper lights, terrariums populated with cake decorations, mosses, and cut-out figures of Albert Einstein. This creative saturation profoundly shaped her practice. "Honestly, I really don't think I could do anything else," she says in one of her interviews.

Today, Beerman's painting seduce through chaos. Vibrant brushstrokes in blues, pinks, and saturated greens sprawl across canvas alongside found objects plucked from her everyday life: dog toys, umbrellas, fabric, spice jars, wigs, and glitter. Her practice is rooted in desire—both for painting itself and for a kind of unrestrained, embodied mark-making that recalls the gestural exuberance of Louise Fishman and Joan Snyder. Working in the lineage of Robert Rauschenberg's Combines, Beerman creates canvases that blur the boundary between painting, sculpture, and living.

Her materials don't stay contained; they spill across studio floors and bedsheets, marking surfaces with traces of the body's everyday presence—smears, stains, accidents that refuse erasure. These paintings don't just depict desire; they enact it—a carnal urge to create that makes no apology for mess, embodiment, or the transgressive spaces where painting lives.

Beerman works entirely on the floor, layering and accumulating materials over time. Paintings breathe and grow in her studio for years, developing through spontaneity and slowness, bold strokes and delicate gestures, happy accidents and formal challenges. Her work is driven by what she calls "desperation, survival and connection"—and also by color, texture, loss, grief, humor, and the small intimacies of holding hands and hugs.

Hannah Beerman holds a BA in Studio Art from Bard College and an MFA from Hunter College. Her paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Brooklyn Museum, Thomas Erben Gallery, Anton Kern, Kapp Kapp, and numerous other venues. Her work has been reviewed in Interview Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Cultured Magazine, and other publications. Beerman has lectured at institutions across the country including the Cooper Union, RISD, Cornell University, and the University of Wisconsin. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.