In postwar New York, Abstract Expressionists loomed large. Artists debated the future of American painting in downtown bars and dealers hung bravado-infused canvases in Uptown galleries. In the wake of World War II, as New York eclipsed Paris as the center of the international art world, a generation of artists embraced gestural brushwork and monumental scale to grapple with an unprecedented level of destruction.
But the story of American postwar art is hardly as settled as its canon might suggest. At Shamnoski Gallery on New York’s Upper East Side, Matthew Shamnoski is turning his attention to artists who may fit less neatly into the established narrative but deserve a closer look.
Shamnoski had worked for other galleries for nearly a decade before launching Projects 28, an online endeavor, in 2023. He ran that business for roughly two years, showing at several art fairs along the way, but soon longed for brick-and-mortar. “I knew I had to go out and meet people where they were; I couldn’t just be some guy behind a computer,” he says. He also recognized the benefit of putting a face to the name—and a name to the face. “With Projects 28, I wanted to be a bit anonymous, but I realized I needed to rebrand.” In November 2025, he did just that, opening Shamnoski Gallery on East 72nd Street.
Though the name changed, the dealer’s love of postwar abstraction—and the driving motivation to uncover a richer art history—remained. “You can love any painting because of how it looks, but for me, it’s just the starting point,” he says. “The postwar New York artists watched as two atomic bombs were dropped, then saw the start of the Cold War, and had so much anxiety. This existential crisis compelled them to paint.”
While exhibitions and auction records have coalesced around totemic names like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko—and, more recently, expanded to include towering women like Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell—Shamnoski insists there is more fertile ground to plow. “There are hundreds of names that people don’t know because they were too concerned with decoding a Pollock or a Rothko,” he explains. “I want to show the vibrant artist community that worked alongside these better-known figures.”
Since opening, Shamnoski has presented exhibitions featuring artists including Susan Rand, who paints abstracted, slightly geometric figures in rich color, and Herman Cherry, a painter of lyrical and introspective abstraction. Shamnoski specializes in artists’ estates, scouring archival materials and historical catalogs to flesh out artists’ stories.
The gallery’s current exhibition, “Alcopley: The Infinite Is Dangerously Far,” makes the case for yet another reconsideration. On view through Nov. 15, the show features three decades in the practice of Alfred Lewin Copley. Born in Dresden in 1910, the artist, physician, and scientist better known as Alcopley moved to the United States and became a prominent figure in New York’s Abstract Expressionist scene. He participated in the landmark 1951 Ninth Street Show, which helped establish Abstract Expressionism as a defining force in American art, but was never fully embraced by the movement. Family circumstances took Alcopley back to Europe in the 1950s, exposing him to the formalism of European modernity.
“The Infinite Is Dangerously Far” reveals how the artist’s brushstroke evolved, at first bearing echoes of the frenetic quality that was a cornerstone of Abstract Expressionism. In Untitled, 1961, red, blue, and yellow lines resembling the end of a thick brush hover over a background of swirling black lines. As Alcopley’s work evolved, he shifted toward more sweeping, exaggerated gestures in pared-down compositions. He also embraced saturated backgrounds, like the remarkably restrained At Sea, 1986, a single, massive brushstroke set against solid green.
For Shamnoski, Alcopley is part of a larger constellation of artists whose work complicates the conventional narratives of postwar American painting. “If I come out of any show having made zero sales, but having made an impact on a collector’s understanding of postwar art, I’d consider that a success,” Shamnoski says. “People love an overlooked narrative or rediscovered artist, but the history is all there, and these artists shouldn’t be reduced to the term ‘overlooked.’ We should appreciate them for the quality of their works and the richness of their stories.”
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