Art Cologne 2026: Lisa Giordano and Gavin Gleeson
Palo Gallery is thrilled to announce its participation in Art Cologne 2026. In its fourth year presenting at the fair, Palo’s booth will feature new works by Lisa Giordano and Gavin Gleeson. The presentation unites two exceptional painters with shared obsessions around painting, ambiguity, and the metaphysical. Having recently exhibited together in Palo Gallery’s group show on ambiguity, Subject Object, this will be the second time Gleeson and Giordano explore the juxtapositions and commonalities of their practices.
While aesthetically divergent Giordano and Gleeson are connected in their unique approach to dissecting the world through painting. In both cases the artists strive to come to essential and even metaphysical understandings of the world we inhabit.
Giordano’s modestly scaled paintings, inspired by the history of intimist painting, endeavor to reduce objects from glass to food to essential and pure forms. Her practice involves extensive looking and studying so that each brush stroke or mark has been long considered. Giordano’s personal experiences in monastic communities has been an inspiration for pureism in her work, and the ultimate religious humility that each painting achieves. Her restrained earthen palette of self prepared pigments further pushes her image making into ambiguous space that comes closer to the essential truth of things than a hyper reality.
Gleeson takes a similar approach in trying to parse out the ambiguity and uncertainty of reality, but through the idea of spaces and namely thresholds. Gleeson takes a lush and expressive approach to painting with bold colour and evocative mark making. This style is used to render repeated from his life from his commute along the Thames to a theatre stage. Gleeson’s interest in such spaces lies in the subtle changes that they endure from each second to decade. For example in Teatime he paints a farm in Ireland, but instead of considering it as still he paints the movement of the day from raising fences and breaks for tea to the movement of weather and the growth of crops. Much like Giordano, Gleeson strives to understand elements of our world at a more metaphysical level, thinking about space in painting as living and finding the implication in constant movement and meaning in change.
The presentation at Art Cologne 2026 will include six framed paintings by Giordano and five by Gleeson. In a split presentation is designed to encourage the exploration of the theoretical and obsessive unity between these two optically divergent practices. Moreover, the presentation will highlight two artists deeply dedicated to the act of painting and the magic of mark making.
