September 10 – October 10, 2026 

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 10, 6-8PM

In cooperation with C.G. Boerner, New York

Light Between Rooms is a series of paintings of windows picked out by bright light: the window admits the light, which in turn describes the window's form. This is the latest in a sequence of works by artist Alexander Massouras that translate aspects of photography—such as camera flare or the chromatic range of C-Type prints—back into painting. In chemical photography, the light makes the image; in the paintings of Light Between Rooms, Massouras makes that process manual, using highlights as the principal method of painterly description.

Alberti once described painting as a window: 'I inscribe a quadrangle of right angles, as large as I wish ’, he wrote, 'which is considered to be an open window through which I see what I want to paint'. Seeing 'what I want to paint' is an early and tantalizing account of something between imagination and observation, full of circularity in describing the transition between one and the other. Where Massouras introduces blinds into the windows, that back-and-forth is given visual expression: sometimes it is the blind that is painted, sometimes the image through it. This process, in turn, gives form to the enduring conversation between abstraction and representation in contemporary painting. A painting is both a window and a wall, something looked through (for its image or its meaning) and looked at (as a flat surface covered with paint). The blinds and windows of Light Between Rooms express this dualism of surface and illusion.

Massouras’s window paintings will be on view this fall at Planthouse, in conjunction with a survey of the artist’s etchings at C.G. Boerner’s New York gallery, located down the hall from Planthouse in suite 419 of the West Chelsea Arts Building. Light Between Rooms is Massouras’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Alexander Massouras (b. 1981) is a British artist and writer based in Cambridge whose practice spans painting, printmaking, and drawing. His work is in international collections including the British Museum, the V&A, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He was a member of the research project “Art School Educated” at Tate, a Leverhulme Fellow at the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre.

Download the exhibition press release here.