EXPO Chicago 2026

For EXPO Chicago 2026, SECRIST | BEACH is pleased to present a curated group exhibition featuring select works by gallery artists alongside previews of new work by those with upcoming solo presentations later this year.

The booth is conceptually divided into three distinct yet interrelated parts. One section is devoted to works “of the night,” exploring themes tied to the darker phase of the cyclical passage of time. Highlights include an immersive installation of abstract paintings by Luftwerk, illuminated under UV light; Nik Cho’s narrative paintings capturing intimate and poignant nightclub scenes; Whitney Bedford’s art-historically inspired Veduta paintings rendered in moonlight; and drawings by Anne Lindberg that subtly evoke the transitional moment when night begins to emerge.

Another section presents a pairing of artists whose works engage organic matter and its protean relationship to human experience. Stephen Eichhorn’s intricate collages on paper and panel merge botanical imagery with hard-edged abstraction, while Jacqueline Surdell’s large-scale wall reliefs, woven from shipping line, evoke landscape as a site of memory, projection, and control.

The final pairing brings together two artists of Latin American heritage: Jeffly Molina and Liliana Porter. Molina’s paintings encompass still lifes of what she calls her “home-made sculptures” and self-portraits that reflect on memory, family, work, loss and love, while underscoring the topical discussion around immigration. Porter’s works on paper and sculpture incorporate everyday found objects, toys, and figurines to investigate themes of identity, labor and time. With an idiosyncratic blend of poetic metaphor and humor she constructs - and reconstructs - situations in which ordinary objects are transformed into agents of reflection on the human condition.