Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to announce Touching the Surface, a solo exhibition of new paintings by New York–based artist Summer Wheat. This marks the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.

In Touching the Surface, Wheat explores a world in transition, where perception shifts and familiar forms dissolve. Painted with acrylic and gouache on aluminum mesh, these works expand her ongoing investigation into materiality, emotion, and narrative.

Wheat is known for her tactile surfaces and inventive technique. Using scrapers, syringes, fingers, and piping bags, she pushes paint through fine mesh to build layered compositions that hover between abstraction and figuration. Each work invites close viewing, revealing a dense interplay of gesture, pattern, and transparency.

In Wheat’s narratives, the action often centers on the labor and leisure of women, figures who work with nature rather than against it. They are caretakers, navigators, and builders, grounded in acts of making and sustaining. In this new body of work, women chart a voyage by boat, fish for crabs, or stack their catch into sculptural forms. In Shark Fountain, a woman flattens into space, gripping two sharks, unafraid, in control, physically integrated with them. Even amid tension, harmony and strength prevail, their gestures convey unity with nature rather than domination. When men appear, as in Waves Night and Waves Day, they serve the women, embodying intimacy and support. The women remain central, guiding both the emotional and visual structure of the works.

The palette centers on vibrant orange, representing the sun, and deep blue, representing water as the ground. Across all six paintings, composition occurs entirely in water, there is no firm land, emphasizing fluidity, instability, and immersion in Wheat’s imagined environments.

The exhibition examines the space where intimacy meets instability, where touch is both grounding and a mode of navigation. Wheat’s surfaces hold tension between what endures and what slips away, asking how we locate the human within constant change. Created during a time of political and emotional uncertainty, the paintings reflect both instability and renewal. Through these semi-submerged worlds, Wheat captures the push and pull between stillness and movement, collapse and endurance.

Seen together, the paintings extend Wheat’s exploration of transformation—of material, perception, and human experience. Continuing her interest in collapsing hierarchies between figure and ground, art and craft, and logic and intuition, these works present painting as a form of endurance and renewal. Touching the Surface offers a grounded vision of tenderness and resilience amid uncertainty, inviting viewers to find balance within change.