April 23 – June 6, 2026
Nicholas Ruth: Here and There
Planthouse
In Person Viewing:
526 W 26th St #416
New York, NY 10001
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 23, 6-8PM
Online viewing: https://planthouse.net/pages/future-exhibition
Planthouse is pleased to present Here and There, a solo exhibition of prints, drawings, and paintings by Nicholas Ruth, on view from April 23 through June 6, 2026. The show combines digitally generated, hand-pulled prints with paintings and drawings to explore the relationship between present conditions and imagined futures. In the prints, motifs appropriated from Renaissance engravings are juxtaposed with contemporary photographic imagery, bringing historical print vocabularies into conversation with digital processes. References to engraved lines evoke an earlier era of scientific discovery and rapid technological development, while the photographic elements situate the works within the visual language of the present. Through these layered methods, the images move between historical and contemporary modes of representation.
The prints in Here and There engage the history of printmaking and its role in shaping representation and the circulation of ideas while the drawings and paintings hover more deliberately between representation and abstraction. In both cases, these fictional worlds celebrate the power of pictures to influence how we understand what we experience. In this way, Ruth creates images that exist across temporal registers, here and there, now and then, suggesting how all instances of the present are informed by our pasts and relate to futures we imagine and hope for.
Across the exhibition, detailed foregrounds often open onto expansive landscapes or atmospheric fields of color, without a clear path connecting them. In these spaces, distance becomes aspiration. Nature, immersive and largely unburdened by human presence, carries much of the narrative weight, while color and form suggest emotional and temporal movement. The resulting images inhabit multiple times and spaces simultaneously, reflecting how we experience the present while projecting ourselves into what lies beyond it. Romantic and hopeful, the works ultimately return to the fundamental conditions of time and space: the ways we live inside them, and the ways they live inside us.
Nicholas Ruth is a Professor of Art at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York. Ruth received a BA from Pomona College and earned an MFA in Painting from the Meadow’s School of Art at Southern Methodist University. His work has been included in more than 150 exhibitions nationally and internationally, and is in collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Print Collection of the New York Public Library, the Rockwell Museum, the Memorial Art Gallery, and the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art.
