Westfield Painter Gwen Yip Featured In Lower East Side Exhibition

WESTFIELD, NJ — A Westfield-based painter will be featured in a new two-person exhibition opening this week on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Collective Z announced that Second Nature, a show of paintings by Gwen Yip and Spencer Patrick, will run Aug. 6 to 29 at the gallery at 325 Broome St. in New York.

An opening reception is scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 6, from 6 to 9 p.m., and the gallery said both artists will be present.

The exhibition includes paintings from Yip's Subway Backs series, which the gallery said she has developed over the past 14 years.

According to the exhibition announcement, the series shows riders from behind across subway platforms, corridors and stairways in New York.

The release describes 19 paintings made between 2012 and 2026 and says the exhibition follows a single New York day across public and private spaces.

In the main room, Patrick's Artificial series focuses on interior scenes. Yip's platform paintings will be shown in the back room, according to the gallery.

For Yip, the work centers on distance, movement and the limits of what can be known by looking.

In her artist statement, she wrote, "I paint figures seen from behind in public and transitional spaces, where people are physically near yet psychologically distant."

She added, "By withholding faces, expression, and direct narrative, I use posture, distance, and surrounding space to suggest what cannot be fully known.”

Yip also connected the work to her own experience living in several cities.

"Having lived across Hong Kong, London, New York, and now New Jersey, I am interested in everyday environments shaped by movement, repetition, and fleeting encounters," she wrote. "Across these settings, I return to the same question: how do we share space with others while remaining unreachable?"

Collective Z founder Alex Z. Wang said the pairing came together through an open call.

"These two painters found each other through an open call, and the pairing felt inevitable," Wang said. "Gwen has spent 14 years watching the city from across the tracks; Spencer paints what happens when we finally get home and close the door."

Yip holds an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in London and has exhibited in New York, London, Amsterdam and Hong Kong.

Gallery hours for Second Nature are Wednesday through Saturday from 1 to 6 p.m. and by appointment.

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