By Annie Lee | November 2025 Official Press Release
Color is the pulse of this exhibition, not background, not accent, but the very force that drives it forward. Vivid Force: The Power of Bold Color, curated by Michael O’Malley at Bushwick Gallery, is an orchestration of intensity, a study of color as emotion, energy, and declaration. Here, boldness is not indulgence; it is necessity. Color becomes language, vibration, and revelation, a force that expands beyond sight into sensation.
Fifteen artists converge in this radiant presentation, each using hue not as ornament but as oxygen. Across paint, ceramic, textile, photography, and abstraction, the exhibition unfolds like a living spectrum, inviting viewers to experience color as conviction—its heat, its weight, its power to reveal truth.
The Center of Force
At the heart of the show are five anchoring visions. David Bender’s August Snow captures a paradox of seasons, a summer transformed by the hush of snowfall. His muted grays and pearled whites shimmer with restraint and melancholy, channeling a quiet environmental dissonance beneath calm. Across from him, Zeynep Solakoğlu’s The Butterfly Vase glows with mythic serenity, a ceramic form painted with meditative precision. Its imagery of metamorphosis treats transformation as philosophy, where color becomes renewal.
Sario De Nola’s Untitled erupts in spontaneous gesture, where pigment becomes movement and abstraction becomes memory. His mark-making feels alive, like music caught midair. Kajal Zaveri’s Warm Embrace returns to stillness, her oil painting radiating the soft blaze of autumn. Layers of crimson and gold move like breath, a quiet hymn to light and change.
At the exhibition’s gravitational center, Gina Keatley’s Spiral Surge absorbs the spectrum into shadow. Painted in deep blacks and earthen tones, it holds light within its surface. Circular strokes expand and contract, transforming repetition into meditation. Keatley’s work captures energy condensed into form, proving that even in darkness, boldness has its own brilliance.
Expanding the Spectrum
From this core, Vivid Force expands outward like light breaking through glass. Matt Furman’s Red brings immediacy and wit, a portrait of emotion rendered in pure chroma. His oil surface hums with tension and play, turning color into psychological theatre. Ebelle Shum’s Flight into Dreamery opens to ethereal skies of saffron and rose, her brushwork balanced between dream and memory.
Jovan Stockhammer’s The Busboy translates human rhythm into visual cadence. His acrylics and paint markers pulse with the tempo of labor, motion captured as empathy. April Baez’s The Elusive Heart of the Rainbow Garden rises in sculpted acrylic blooms. Each flower, molded by hand, is both prayer and proof that joy can be built from struggle.
Cole Levi-Crouch’s I’m a bird, I’m a plane, I’m mentally insane unfolds like a surreal confession, a pop collision of superheroes, clouds, and confession. His humor conceals a quiet anxiety, revealing vulnerability beneath absurdity.
White Deer’s Where Currents Collide offers a counterpoint, stillness through movement. Layers of oil and acrylic shift like tide and memory, creating a meditation on water, reflection, and surrender.
Sam Price’s The Bigger Picture is a meditation on confronting existential risk in a time when a fog of colorful vanity saturates our minds. Peiyang Camille Li’s Medusa Octopus from Nuclear Waste: Mutant Creatures electrifies the space with woven color. Crafted from recycled fibers, its neon pinks and deep violets form a living commentary on adaptation and survival.
Tibor Matijas’s Eternal Appointment occupies the edge between realism and reverie. His surreal landscapes, painted in muted light, turn time into a visible field of feeling.
The exhibition culminates with Marc Mauro’s Volcanic Splash, a photographic crescendo of bioluminescent intensity. Capturing a rare coral brain under a custom LED spectrum, Mauro transforms marine life into cosmic phenomenon. His molten reds and radiant golds speak of energy born under pressure, color as both eruption and meditation. The work becomes the exhibition’s heartbeat, proof that luminosity is a kind of faith, a persistence of vision that refuses to dim.
The Language of Bold Color
Vivid Force reveals that bold color is not simply an aesthetic choice but a philosophy of risk and renewal. Each artist approaches color as language, as evidence of being alive. The exhibition thrives on tension between shadow and saturation, control and release, perception and pulse.
Curator Michael O’Malley conducts this symphony with precision, pacing the show as a movement through radiance and restraint. The gallery itself becomes a body of light, breathing with each shift of hue.
In the end, Vivid Force is not about brightness but courage. It asks the viewer to see color not as decoration but as declaration, an act of truth that glows long after the eyes have adjusted.
Exhibition Information
Title: Vivid Force: The Power of Bold Color
Location: Bushwick Gallery, 22 Fayette Street, Brooklyn, NY
Dates: November 13 to November 20, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 13, 6 PM to 8 PM
Curated by: Michael O’Malley
Featured Artists – Vivid Force: The Power of Bold Color
David Bender — In August Snow, restrained grays and soft whites evoke a world out of sync, transforming environmental stillness into meditation on impermanence.
Zeynep Solakoğlu — The Butterfly Vase merges myth and material, its painted ceramic surface glowing with quiet renewal and the grace of transformation.
Sario De Nola — In Untitled, gesture becomes memory. Each mark captures the rhythm of thought, transforming abstraction into the poetry of motion.
Kajal Zaveri — Warm Embrace translates autumnal light into a living surface of color. Her layered oils breathe with warmth, turning change into calm radiance.
Gina Keatley — In Spiral Surge, black and umber absorb the spectrum, revealing energy at rest. Her circular strokes render motion as meditation and endurance as art.
Matt Furman — Red confronts emotion through hue. A study of immediacy and impulse, the painting vibrates between play and tension, humor and heat.
Ebelle Shum — Flight into Dreamery floats between memory and myth, where cranes and distant suns move through veils of light and longing.
Jovan Stockhammer — The Busboy captures rhythm and repetition in layered acrylic and marker. Each gesture becomes pulse, each color a record of presence.
April Baez — The Elusive Heart of the Rainbow Garden transforms grief into brilliance. Her sculpted acrylic blooms radiate faith, color, and renewal.
Cole Levi-Crouch — I’m a bird, I’m a plane, I’m mentally insane explodes with pop surrealism, humor, and anxiety. His sky becomes a diary written in clouds.
White Deer — Where Currents Collide renders water as emotion, layering oil and acrylic into tides of reflection and surrender.
Sam Price — The Bigger Picture is a meditation on confronting existential risk in a time when a fog of colorful vanity saturates our minds.
Peiyang (Camille) Li — Medusa Octopus from Nuclear Waste: Mutant Creatures fuses fiber, philosophy, and critique, crafting a radiant creature that warns and mesmerizes.
Tibor Matijas — Eternal Appointment turns time into dreamscape, where surreal landscapes become metaphors for ambition, waiting, and awakening.
Marc Mauro — Volcanic Splash ignites the exhibition with molten reds and golds, capturing coral as cosmic eruption and light as living matter.