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Black White & Gray: an Achromatic Color Exhibition

Curated by Anne Trauben.

Drawing Rooms
926 Newark Ave
Jersey City, NJ 07306
June 11–July 11, 2026

Henry Brown is participating in Black White and Gray: an Achromatic Color Exhibition. This group show includes work focusing on graphic form, delicate abstraction, narration, and anything and everything in between using achromatic colors—black and white which sit on opposing ends of the grayscale—and works in gray.

Black, as with all achromatic colors, lacks hue and absorbs all light wavelengths. White combines and reflects all visible wavelengths, so while it contains all colors, it is still perceived as lacking hue. The contrast between white and black is the greatest of any color combination, providing a bold and dramatic look.

Historic artworks with an achromatic color scheme—composed entirely of black, white, and grey—focusing on form, contrast, and texture over color include:

  • Bridget Riley’s op-art piece White Disks
  • Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, featuring a simple black square on a white background
  • Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic series
  • Vija Celmins’ gray-toned illustrations of oceans, deserts, and night skies
  • Franz Kline’s large-scale, black-and-white abstract expressionist paintings, such as Black, White, and Gray

Drawing Rooms art gallery at the Mana Contemporary complex in Jersey City is a project of Victory Hall Inc., a 501(c)3 non-profit organization producing exhibitions, programs, and public art projects in the NJ/NY area with a national and international reach since 2001.

Mondriaanhuis

In 2024 Henry Brown had a print as part of a print portfolio accepted into the permanent collection at Mondriaanhuis in Amersfoort, Netherlands. Mondriaanhuis is the birthplace of Piet Mondrian and a museum. It hosts changing exhibitions, houses a collection of geometric abstract and another of constructive concrete art.

Painters on Paintings

Painters on Paintings (PoP) published “Henry Brown on Piet Mondrian”, April 5, 2026. The essay discusses spatial interpretations of a Mondrian painting on display at the Museum of Modern Art. Painters on Paintings features artists writing about works of art from a practitioner’s perspective.

On the Grid, Off the Grid

Curated by Anne Trauben.

Drawing Rooms
926 Newark Ave
Jersey City, NJ 07306
February 5–March 1, 2026

Henry Brown was included in On the Grid, Off the Grid. The grid has been used in art history as a tool for creating accurate and proportional drawings during the Renaissance by Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer to help maintain a consistent viewpoint and accuracy when drawing from life, or when working on a larger scale. During Modernism, Mondrian used a grid as a fundamental structure for his abstract paintings and Malevich’s Suprematist art expressed pure geometric forms and a new, non-objective reality. Agnes Martin’s structured minimalist paintings incorporate drawn lines by hand using rulers and pencils which introduced subtle imperfections that she considered crucial to the work. Sol LeWitt used the grid as a starting point for his conceptual work, creating a system with pre-defined rules and letting the system generate the final artwork.

The grid is rich with associations and use for artists, and the concept of being On or Off the Grid may also relate to our current society which relies on our interconnected and ever-widening systems of communication and media prevalent today.

Works for this show may engage a literal system of the grid or a distortion or deconstruction of the grid, and may make reference to the cyber-connected universe we live in or to a departure from it. Or works might express ideas that go off in a different direction entirely from the specific way the artist works.

Drawing Rooms is operated by Victory Hall Inc. a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization producing exhibitions, programs and public art projects in the NJ/NY area since 2001.