For Immediate Release
Mary Devincentis
Like a Star at Dawn
September 9 – October 17, 2026
Freight+Volume is very pleased to present Like A Star at Dawn, the second solo show of recent paintings by Mary DeVincentis at our Tribeca space. The exhibition runs from September 9th to October 17th, 2026.
In the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha employs a series of metaphors to jolt the thinking mind into a heart-mind-gut awareness of the transitory nature of our lives and of all life. Like a Star at Dawn is one such metaphor, and the artist chose it as the title for her upcoming solo at Freight+Volume. The paintings included in this exhibition depict encounters between people, animals and nature, light and darkness, temporality and eternity. Each work explores this existential terrain in its own visual and emotional language.
The late great Dave Hickey once stated, Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. DeVincentis' uncannily beautiful paintings are indeed seditious - unabashedly presenting a world of beauty, truth, and wonder in an art world fraught with irony, mannerism and posturing. She is radical in that pursuit - a seer, a visionary who doggedly goes her own way, creating her own singular path despite the pressure of trend and popular opinion in our age of sound bite, sensation, and a social media-governed art industry.
There is magic in DeVincentis' work - an intuitive mix of sorcery of the soul culminating in unique, idiosyncratic paintings which capture that A-HA creative moment when everything comes together, when both artist and viewer know it's just right. Ed Moses used to refer to the artist as shaman, and DeVincentis certainly fills that persona. She creates indelible images on the viewer's memory long after initial encounters.
Blossoming cherry trees, waterfalls, rainbows, dancing dogs and tigers, mermaids, endless blue skies, full moons, butterflies, spider webs, lovers, sunrise and sunsets are all depicted with an unapologetic passion for beauty, and joy - with a disarmingly childlike directness of color and bravery of brushstroke. In a review of a 2015 Bill Jensen exhibition the writer Katelynn Mills expressed ...mostly what painting is, is a yearning for the impossible union of spirit and physical matter - an insatiable prayer. A union is to be had in the completion of a picture, a provisional answer to our prayer. A form which demands the viewer to believe the illusion and content... (Mills/Two Coats of Paint).
DeVincentis' exquisite new paintings are the very embodiment of insatiable prayers.
Please join us for a public reception on Wednesday, Sept. 9th from 6-830pm at 39 Lispenard St. in Tribeca to celebrate Mary's new show, Like a Star at Dawn, as well as the start of the 2026/27 gallery season in NYC.
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Mary DeVincentis employs a deeply personal iconography to explore the psychological and existential dimensions of being. Creating visual narratives which are multidimensional in character, her paintings depict people, animals and nature, emphasizing their equal presence and metaphysical dimensions. Her most recent solo exhibitions include Know Your Garden at Tappeto Volante Projects in 2025, Circle Game at Andrea Festa Fine Art in 2024, and Wild Awake at Freight+Volume in 2023. DeVincentis earned her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and a Postgraduate Diploma in Advanced Printmaking from St. Martin's College of Art in London, UK. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is represented in numerous public and private collections. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.