Sky Blue — Subtitled NYC

Sky Blue

09.18 – 10.25.2026

Louis Block, Spencer Finch, Byron Kim, and Motohiro Takeda

For our varied and innumerable perceptions of the world around, a scant few are recorded here by Byron Kim, Spencer Finch, Motohiro Takeda, and Louis Block. Impressions they may be, or reflections more likely. A cherry blossom falls, a branch bears its leaves for the last time, a wisp of cloud passes out of view. What remains of these moments is a feeling, a particular combination of sights or smells that recall something of time passed.

Maybe it was the criss-crossing trajectory of the petals as they tumbled through the air, held aloft, here and there, by the wind before gravity carried them downward. Maybe it was the lonely contour of a branch, bereft of its fruit and waiting, for the warmth of a new season that brings with it the tickle of sun across its spine. Maybe it was simply looking up at the sky with eyes closed, that the dance of wind and sun across your face carried with them some fond recollection of yesterday or yesteryear. Overcome by the effortless peeling back of time brought on by nothing more than a fine attunement to the liveness that surrounds, you may sit more consciously in the present, or any number of past presents. The sky too can be so many shades of blue.

“Sky blue” may be a color, yes. Colloquially that is, but not scientifically. No, sky blue is not a color so much as a memory. Another place, another mindset, another time with another person. In paintings, drawings, and sculptures, each of the artists here capture something that would have remained otherwise ineffable. But from their ruminations in color and light take shape a precious manifestation of what can only be nostalgia; a feeling not lost to time but buried in it. Under layers of a life lived, calcified by the weight of their own aggregation, smoothed over by the repeated lapping of water on rock, a mere flicker may be all that is needed, one wave refracted amongst a million rays, it takes the shortest path to you as blue.

Sky blue is a place you go.

-Hannah Sage Kay

Louis Block is a painter based in Brooklyn. His work has been shown in New York, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Annapolis, Massachusetts, Chicago, and Venice. His writings and interviews with artists have been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Border Crossings, Hyperallergic, and Full Bleed Journal, among others. Block is a recipient of a 2025 Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellowship and a 2026–27 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Residency.

Spencer Finch explores the elusive nature of perception through light, color, memory, and the natural world. From the color of a sunset to the shadows of passing clouds or the light in a Turner painting, Finch combines precise observation and scientific methods with a poetic sensibility. Working across installation, sculpture, and works on paper, he considers how our experiences of the world are shaped by time, place, and memory.
Spencer Finch was born in 1962 in New Haven, CT, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His major projects include Trying To Remember the Color of the Sky on That September Morning at the 9/11 Memorial, New York (2014); Lost Man Creek with Public Art Fund, Brooklyn (2016–2018); A Cloud Index at Paddington Station, London (2022); and a site-specific installation for the Obama Presidential Center, Chicago (2026). Finch participated in the Whitney Biennial (2004) and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). His work is held in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Byron Kim works at the intersection of abstraction, representation, and conceptual painting. Often using monochrome and minimalist forms, his paintings draw on personal experience while engaging broader questions of identity, perception, and the everyday. His ongoing Sunday Paintings series, begun in 2001, records the appearance of the sky each week alongside a brief diary entry, bringing together the cosmological and the quotidian.
Born in 1961, Kim lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and San Diego, CA. His signature work, Synecdoche, begun in 1991 and exhibited in the 1993 Whitney Biennial, is in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. His work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Tate Liverpool, Sharjah Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, and Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, among others. Kim’s work is held in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, National Gallery of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Brooklyn Museum, and M+

Motohiro Takeda works across photography, ceramics, sculpture, installation, and performance.Through site-responsive and process-based practices, he draws attention to the material and metaphorical qualities of his chosen media, exploring the ephemerality of memory, the relationship between human beings and the natural world, and the recurring cycles of life and death. Takeda received his BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design at The New School in 2008 and his MFA in Studio Art from Columbia University in 2023. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

All photos courtesy of Subtitled NYC, New York