A Reprieve

A REPRIEVE

December 14 to January 25, 2026

Curated by Jesse Bandler Firestone

Artists: Cena Pohl Crane, Grace Larkin, Nadja Verena Marcin,  

Daniel McKleinfeld, Yvonne Roeb, Taney Roniger

“The quieter you become the more you can hear” ― Ram Dass 

In an age of overstimulation, rising costs, and relentless pressure, people long for:  A Reprieve. This aptly named, thematic exhibition offers radical simplicity: a return to sensual color, familiar shapes, soothing rhythm and deeper calm.  This exhibition gathers seven international artists –all alumni from KUNSTRAUM’s exhibition program, an ongoing curatorial platform since 2015– whose works double as salves, pauses, and portals.

Breathwork, intimacy, and vulnerability unfold through their use color, form, and gesture, calling us back to the most fundamental aspects of life and beauty within. 

Marking Kunstraum’s ten-year anniversary, A Reprieve reflects the space’s founding ethos: a grassroots community for artists to come together, build together, and breathe together within the bustle of New York City.  Amid the noise of contemporary life, these artists find both clarity and power in creating intentional space for stillness, allowing for rest, contemplation, and new action to come forth. Responding uniquely to the theme – abstraction, material attention, and re-connecting to nature are just some of the strategies employed by these artists. These aspects further reveal to the viewer nuanced approaches including the reclamation of public space as sites for peaceful, private encounters or abstract video art as a tool to quiet the mind through meditation. The resulting works don’t retreat from reality; they invite us to reencounter it gently and deliberately, with renewed presence and a restored sense of possibility, one breath at a time. 

Taney Roger’s Broken Horizon—a graphite polyptych drawing spanning five wood panels—captures the serenity of the natural world through the phenomenology of light. Her large-scale drawings meditate on the ways light moves through matter and memory, recalling primal forms: a cave’s mouth, a forest canopy, a distant horizon. These elemental references evoke a sense of earthly belonging, suggesting that spirituality can be found not in transcendence but in the here and now.  

Daniel McKleinfeld brings together custom algorithmic video processing and artist-lead editing to create meditative video works that function as “visual breathing exercises” where viewers can breathe sync with the hypnotic pulsing of shapes and color. In his video-compositions, patterns dissolve, reform, and flicker. He invites sustained attention without urgency through soothing rhythms that echo early TV screen tests for collaboration and 1960 psychedelia. In this way, McKleinfeld’s works become tools for release and return, where the viewer’s attention is invited to meander alongside focused breathwork so presence and perception can drift and renew. 

Cena Pohl Crane channels longing and transition in Upstate Dream 1 and Upstate Dream 2. Created during her move from Brooklyn to the Catskill Mountains, the paintings vibrate with the bold colors and restorative energy of mountain springs and the crispness of forest air. Her canvases oscillate between urban memory and pastoral possibility—a meditation on homecoming and transformation. Scenes of figures emerge within these bucolic landscapes, embodying the emotional and physical journey toward a slower, more grounded way of life outside the urban pollution of senses.  

Grace Larkin’s work turns to mythology and interspecies care as antidotes to alienation. Drawing from Celtic lore, her paintings of white cows and children reference the Cow Goddess Boann and Saint Brigid—symbols of nourishment, femininity, and renewal. In a cultural climate dominated by exclusion and the bifurcation of mental, spiritual, and emotional aspects of the Self, Larkin’s imagery restores tenderness and reminds us of the sacred and healing bond between humans, animals, and the earth. 

Yvonne Roeb’s ivory colored, fabric sculpture Convergence looks like a dividing cell, or two cells colliding, and captures the energetic tension between exhaustion and regeneration. Roeb’s organic forms balance weight and lightness, stillness and motion, evoking both fatigue and the will to persist. Her works render rest itself as a political gesture, a way of insisting on humanity amid depletion. For Roeb, this persistence is a type of activism: a quiet resistance rooted in the expansiveness of connection.  

While most of the artists in A Reprieve approach abstraction, spirituality, or nature as paths toward solace, Nadja Verena Marcin grounds the exhibition in the escape from social realities of contemporary life. In her Homeland series, the artist performs temporary homes in public urban spaces—a gas station, a fountain, a parking deck— transforming them into fleeting sanctuaries amidst their utilitarian purpose. Through these subtle provocations and imaginaries, Marcin carves out personal space amidst the daily congestion of urban sprawl. Simultaneously, she poetically fabulates on the possibility of belonging, suggesting that the idea of home is less about a place and more about an act of emotional and physical reclamation.  

Together, the works in A Reprieve invites a collective inhale and exhale. In their varied languages—abstraction, sculpture, myth, and entanglement —they point toward a common need to slow down, to return, to feel. At a moment when time itself feels scarce, this exhibition reminds us that acts of care, connection, creativity and pause are both integral to a healthy life and form the basis of resistance to the oppression consumer society and its artificial needs. Within KUNSTRAUM, this new exhibition invites each viewer to seek reprieve not as withdrawal, but as source for hope and for renewal. 

Opening Reception: Sunday, December 14th, 4-6PM 

Curator's Tour: Sunday, January 25th, 4PM

Closing Reception and Open Studios: Sunday, January 25th, 2-6pm 

Address: KUNSTRAUM, 20 Grand Street, Loft 509, Brooklyn, NY 

Visiting Hours: Thursday - Saturday, 12–6 PM, by appointment.  

Please email: Jesse Bandler Firestone at jesse@kunstraumll.com to schedule your visit. 

For press inquiries, images, or interview requests, please contact: Jesse Bandler Firestone, Curator and Community Affiliate – jesse@kunstraumllc.com 

Image Credit: Nadja Verena Marcin, Homeland, 2006